“They don’t find tablets all that exciting for reading news.”
Digital news consumers unlikely to pay for content and increasingly block ads
The takeaway from Reuters’ vast new study of the world’s digital news consumers is that the disruptive trends publishers have been grappling with the last few years have crystallized into something more lasting, not just in the United States but around the world.
Readers deplore online ads, particularly the personalized ones that follow them from site to site. They still don’t want to pay for news. They don’t find tablets all that exciting for reading news. And the homepage is diminishing fast, usurped by Facebook (not so much Twitter).
The biggest surprise: Using apps to block ads has gone mainstream.
Taken together, these hardened rules pose economic threats not just to legacy news brands, but even to the disrupters—Huffington Post, BuzzFeed—that upended digital news in the first place. The study, conducted by the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, in partnership with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, surveyed more than 20,000 people in a dozen countries. And it came with a warning: News companies “will have to be more inventive than ever with editorial and business strategies if they are to survive.”