Ron Berman

Game theorist and data scientist. I study online advertising, marketing analytics and how curation algorithms impact platforms @Penn @Wharton.

[Ron Berman @marketsensei]

Companies invest a lot in analytics - but are these investments valuable?

@IsraeliAyelet and I studied ~1,500 online retailers and found that using a descriptive dashboard increased their weekly revenues by 4%-10%.

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#MarTech #BigData #Analytics #ecommerce #DataScience

[Ron Berman @marketsensei]

Rock ballads in Hebrew have amazing lyrics.

Here's "put a candle in the window" by Stella Maris. I particularly like "put a candle in the window, and we will dance the dance of souls".

https://t.co/UXd4jWTQOY

[Ron Berman @marketsensei]

@josephfwyer @SolomonHanes Well said (and written) Joe!

@eleafeit and I are actually in the process of finalizing some more innovations in the profit maximizing a/b testing world.

[Ron Berman @marketsensei]

@DuduLagziel לא מזמן קיבלתי לשיפוט מאמר שציטט מאמר שלי - ציטט נכון את שם המאמר, המציא כותבים ושנת פרסום...

[Ron Berman @marketsensei]

@ben_golub Not only is there a right to attack the regime. It is a moral obligation by Israel to defend its own citizens.

[Ron Berman @marketsensei]

@ben_golub @ben_golub surprised you're promoting such BS. A regime vows to annihilate another country for 40 years, pursues nuclear weapons, builds a huge ballistic missile arsenal, and funds global terrorism. Then it kills 30k of its own citizens.

[Ron Berman @marketsensei]

אין דומה לה. אולה.

https://t.co/ZwrAdNimF2

[Ron Berman @marketsensei]

‼️News publishers that block LLM access receive even less traffic compared to not blocking‼️

In a new working paper with @HangchengZhao
we use daily traffic data , human web-browsing data, historical robots.txt policies, job postings, and historical webpage content to document early shifts in online news production and consumption.

We ask:

❓How do LLMs impact news publishers? Does consumer traffic decline? Do publishers hire fewer employees or generate more news slop?

❓How do publishers respond to LLMs? Does blocking LLM traffic have a positive or negative impact?

Our findings:

1️⃣ Traffic decline wasn’t immediate. Publisher traffic remained broadly stable through mid-2023; a Synthetic Difference-in-Differences analysis shows a decline in traffic that started after August 2024 (−13%) compared to top retail websites.

2️⃣ Blocking GenAI crawlers may backfire. ~80% of the top publishers block LLMs using robots.txt.
Staggered DiD analysis of the effect of blocking shows that traffic declined after blocking in both SimilarWeb traffic data (−23%) and Comscore data (−14%).

3️⃣ No “newsroom job replacement” yet: Data from job postings show that editorial/content roles do not exhibit a post-GenAI collapse; replacement or reduction of these jobs in the near term appears limited.

4️⃣ Publishers aren’t scaling text volume; instead, they’re “richening” pages. The number of interactive elements rises (+68%) and ads/targeting tech increases (+50%) , while article volume declines relative to top retail websites used as controls.

Key Takeaway: The impact of LLMs is nuanced and sometimes surprising. For example, blocking LLM access using robots.txt may reduce both bot access and real audience demand.

Links to working paper:

SSRN: https://t.co/7rCbfpKGip

arXiv: https://t.co/uXwJvVvZ40

#LLMs #media #news #AI #ArtificialInteligence #DigitalMarketing #digitalmedia

[Ron Berman @marketsensei]

Key Takeaway: The impact of LLMs is nuanced and sometimes surprising. For example, blocking LLM access using robots.txt may reduce both bot access and real audience demand.

[Ron Berman @marketsensei]

‼️New paper‼️

❓How do LLMs impact news publishers? Does consumer traffic decline? Do publishers hire fewer employees or generate more news slop?

❓How do publishers respond to LLMs? Does blocking LLM traffic have a positive or negative impact?
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#GenAI #LLMs #Media #news #AI

[Ron Berman @marketsensei]

4️⃣ Publishers aren’t scaling text volume; instead, they’re “richening” pages. The number of interactive elements rises (+68%) and ads/targeting tech increases (+50%) 🎯📈 , while article volume declines relative to top retail websites used as controls.

[Ron Berman @marketsensei]

Is it a hot take to say that Keanu Reeves is an excellent actor?

[Ron Berman @marketsensei]

Rest in peace Itay.

[Ruby Chen @EmailRubychen]

יום 760
איתי חזר הביתה

Itay is back home
@hagitchen @bringhomenow
@POTUS @SEPeaceMissions @SebGorka @SecRubio

[Ron Berman @marketsensei]

The NY times seems to have some real issues reporting the news.

"After two soldiers were attacked and killed by Hamas" is what really happened...

[Ron Berman @marketsensei]

עם ישראל חי

ושבו בנים לגבולם

[Ron Berman @marketsensei]

Full paper here (open access):

“Naive analytics: The strategic advantage of algorithmic heuristics”

Games and Economic Behavior (2025)
https://t.co/cwqTXTIHv9

[Ron Berman @marketsensei]

New paper alert: Most firms believe better and more precise data = better strategy.

My new paper with @heller_yuval shows this is not always true: sometimes biased algorithms make firms more profitable.
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[Ron Berman @marketsensei]

Takeaway:
- Bias in estimates isn’t always a bug — sometimes it’s a feature.

- In oligopoly settings, “naive” analytics can sometimes beat sophisticated econometrics or unbiased A/B tests.

- That complicates both firm strategy and antitrust policy.