Engagement vs. Commitment: The Economic Trade-Offs of Polarizing News Content (opens in new tab)

Content that drives engagement need not be the same content that drives willingness to pay. We study how polarizing content affects engagement (time on site) and commitment (subscriptions and retention) on a major news platform. We measure article-level polarization with deep-learning classifiers and large language models tailored to a multiparty system, and identify causal effects with two complementary instrumental variables: a Bartik instrume...