Many of the goods and services available online are free in the sense that they do not require financial payments. But they do require investments of time, which is not free. Thus, the price of any time spent on a site online is time not spent doing something else. This paper explores what types of activities, and what specific activities within those types, compete with each other. For example, when you spend less time on social media, where do you spend more time? To answer these questions, we examine a 33 terabyte dataset of more than three trillion observations that includes information on every website that a panel of households visits over a period of four years. We sort these websites into categories of online activity. Among our key findings, social media and news are complements while social media and streaming are substitutes. This has implications for how we think about the markets for social media, news, and streaming, and the attention economy generally.
Sarah Oh Lam is a Senior Fellow at the Technology Policy Institute. Oh completed her PhD in Economics from George Mason University, and holds a JD from GMU and a BS in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University. She was previously the Operations and Research Director for the Information Economy Project at George Mason School of Law. She has also presented research at the 39th Telecommunications Policy Research Conference and has co-authored work published in the Northwestern Journal of Technology & Intellectual Property among other research projects. Her research interests include law and economics, regulatory analysis, and technology policy.
Scott Wallsten is President and Senior Fellow at the Technology Policy Institute and also a senior fellow at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. He is an economist with expertise in industrial organization and public policy, and his research focuses on competition, regulation, telecommunications, the economics of digitization, and technology policy. He was the economics director for the FCC's National Broadband Plan and has been a lecturer in Stanford University’s public policy program, director of communications policy studies and senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a senior fellow at the AEI – Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, an economist at The World Bank, a scholar at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and a staff economist at the U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University.
