This article synthesizes several existing economic perspectives on the incentives for and consequences of media consolidation. Because of the two-sided nature of media markets, media mergers may lead to unexpected effects, which may not be deduced from common notions of industrial economics. We...

Standard media economics models imply that increased platform competition decreases ad levels and that mergers reduce per-viewer ad prices. The empirical evidence, however, is mixed. We attribute the theoretical predictions to the combined assumptions that there is no advertising congestion and...