Non-journalistic competitors of news media brands on Google and YouTube: From solid competition to a liquid media market

ABSTRACT News media are important for society, because they provide information on relevant topics based on journalistic norms, such as truthfulness and impartiality. However, traditional news brands have found new competition in non-journalistic digital media. Google and YouTube have disrupted the business model of journalism by creating platforms on which everything and everyone competes for consumers’ attention. Despite the recognised importance of this topic, empirical studies about the competitive situation of (journalistic) news media brands in the limitless digital media market are scarce. The aim of this study is to investigate the extent to which non-journalistic competitors replace traditional news media brands in relation to relevant topics. A programmed web scraping software automatically gathered Google and YouTube search results of trending topics (e.g. Industry 4.0, Blockchain, or CRISPR). Afterwards, a manual content analysis was conducted to classify the source of each search result (e.g. news media brand, corporate publisher, non-governmental organisation) (N = 556 Google results and 792 YouTube results). The findings show that news media brands still dominate on Google but placed a distant third on YouTube, behind amateurs and corporate publishing. News media brands should reconsider their strategies for YouTube with regard to presenting their content.