Digital 2024 Global News Report

Exploring news trends in a connected world

Keeping up to date with news and current affairs is one of the top three reasons people use the internet today, alongside finding information, and staying in touch with friends and family.

More than three-quarters of adults now rely on digital channels for news, and social media in particular has become our primary gateway to online news content.

However, the world’s relationship with news is increasingly complicated.

Overall interest in news has been declining for a number of years, and levels of public trust in news, the media, and journalism are worryingly low.

These trends don’t aren’t just important for news organisations though; they also offer essential insights for businesses and lawmakers, and they’re a valuable barometer of evolving sentiment in increasingly fractious societies.

As such, the findings in DataReportal’s Digital 2024 Global News Report have implications for everyone.

Methodology notes

Before we explore all the numbers, it’s worth taking a moment to explain where they come from, and what they represent.

A meaningful proportion of the data in this year’s study relies on the latest findings from the annual Digital News Report, published by the erudite team at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) at the University of Oxford.

Now in its 13th year, this ongoing series has been tracking trends in digital news consumption since 2012, and it continues to offer valuable insights into how people discover, engage with, and feel about news.

The latest report in this series – the 2024 Digital News Report – builds on a survey of close to 100,000 adults aged 18 and above across 47 countries, enabling detailed comparisons of how online behaviours vary around the world.

The 2024 edition also includes a wealth of commentary and analysis, so I’d strongly encourage you to read the original report in full over on the RISJ’s Digital News Report website.

However, it’s important to highlight that the RISJ’s research doesn’t include data some of the world’s most populous nations – notably China, Pakistan, and Russia – so the “average” values drawn from this year’s RISJ study only represent about half (49.5 percent) of the world’s total population.

Moreover, these “average” values have not been weighted by the size of local populations or by the number of internet users in each country, and therefore they only represent a basic mean of total survey respondents.

However, these caveats do nothing to detract from the value that the RISJ’s research delivers.

In addition to this RISJ data, we’ve also included insights from the ongoing survey conducted by GWI, which explores a wide variety of digital behaviours in 53 countries around the world.

GWI’s coverage includes both China and Russia, and its annual sample of close to 1 million respondents aged 16 and above represents the activities and preferences of more than 80 percent of the world’s adult internet users.

And on top of the RISJ and GWI data, you’ll also find:

Mobile app use from data.ai
Web traffic trends from Similarweb and Semrush
Evolving social media interests and preferences, based on analysis by Kepios
Interest in news topics over time from Google Trends

Content authenticity

All of the following analysis was written by a human, without the use of generative AI. Please feel free to say hello on LinkedIn, and let me know what you found most interesting or surprising in this year’s report.

Complete Digital 2024 Global News Report

You can find the complete set of charts in this year’s report in the embed below (click here if that’s not working for you), but read on past that to explore an in-depth analysis of what all these numbers actually mean for you, for your work, and for the world we live in.

News interest continues to decline

Perhaps the most profound finding in this year’s data is how people’s relationship with news has been evolving.

We’ve seen an alarming decline in the number of people expressing an interest in news over the past decade, with fewer than half of the RISJ’s sample saying that they’re interested in news today.

More specifically, just 46 percent of 2024 survey respondents said they were either “extremely” or “very” interested in news.

That’s 17 percentage points lower than the 63 percent figure that the RISJ reported back in 2016, which equates to a relative decline of 27 percent over the past eight years.

It’s worth noting that the RISJ survey has significantly expanded its geographic coverage during that time, which may have contributed to the apparent pace of this decline.

However, on a like-for-like basis across 12 “core” markets, the RISJ’s data still shows that interest in news declined from 66 percent in 2018, to 49 percent in 2024.

In other words, this reduced dataset also shows a decline of 17 percentage points, but this time over just the past 6 years.

And crucially, these figures point to the fact that hundreds of millions of people have lost interest in news over the past decade, with women and younger people over-indexing amongst this group.

It’s particularly interesting to note that interest in news continues to decline in 2024, because – with roughly half of the world’s population eligible to vote in national elections this year – there was a chance that the world’s appetite for news might increase this year.

However, the number of people expressing an interest in politics in the RISJ’s 12 “core” markers has also declined by one-third over the past six years, from 45 percent in 2018, to just 30 percent in 2024.

And this reduced affinity for politics may have played an important role in damping people’s interest in news.

For context, in the United Kingdom – a country which just concluded its latest general election – interest in news has almost halved over recent years, falling from 70 percent in 2015 to just 38 percent in 2024.

Admittedly, some countries have seen interest in news increase over the past year, with a three-point uplift in the United States – from 49 percent in 2023, to 52 percent in 2024 – of particular note.

However, this latest US figure is still 15 percentage points lower than the 67 percent recorded in the country in 2015.

Young people are the least interested news

But some of the most alarming findings relate to how interest in news varies by age.

Barely 1 in 3 people aged 18 to 24 – just 34 percent – say that they’re interested in news today, and that figure only increases to 41 percent for people aged 25 to 34.

That compares with more than half of respondents aged 55 and above – 53 percent – who expressed an interest in news in this year’s RISJ survey.

The same individual’s interest in news does appear to increase as they grow older, but interest in news has declined across all age groups over recent years.

As a result, even if we might expect individuals to become more engaged with news as they become older, the latest trends suggest that a significantly smaller proportion of today’s youth will go on to develop an interest in news later in life, as compared with the evolution that we saw across previous generations.

As such, the latest findings offer significant cause for concern for news brands – and potentially for society at large too.

Alternative perspective: interest in news

But these worrying trends aren’t just evident in the RISJ data.

The steady decline of interest in news is also evident in GWI’s ongoing research, with the company’s data showing that global interest in news fell by roughly 8 percentage points between Q1 2019 and Q1 2023.

That’s less dramatic than the 13 percentage point decline we see in the RISJ’s data for the same period, but it still tells a similar story.

However, GWI’s data also shows that interest in news actually increased over the past 12 months.

It’s important to highlight that the recent addition of people over the age of 65 to GWI’s sample has contributed to this apparent growth, but even on a like-for-like basis, GWI’s figures for Q1 2024 are almost 1 percentage point higher than they were in Q1 2023.

But despite this recent uptick, GWI’s data tells an even gloomier story about the world’s interest in news than the RISJ’s data does, with barely 4 in 10 GWI respondents (41.6 percent) saying that they’re interested in news today.

GWI’s global figure is heavily weighed down by values for India and China, due to the fact these countries are home to more than 1 in 3 people alive on Earth today [note that China is not part of the RISJ’s sample, and GWI’s sample is weighted by the size of the internet user base in each market].

Barely 1 in 3 people in these two countries – just 36.3 percent of people in China, and 34.9 percent in India – told GWI that they were interested in news in Q1 2024.

That’s still well ahead of the values we see for Saudi Arabia and Egypt though, where less than a quarter of online adults expressed interest in news and current events.

However, while fewer people are expressing an overt “interest” in news compared with the levels we saw a few years ago, people continue to say that keeping up to date with news and events is one of the primary reasons why they go online.

54 percent of respondents in the latest wave of GWI’s survey cited this as one of their top motivations for using the internet, which is more than 12 percentage points higher than the 41.6 percent who express an “interest” in news.

Compare and contrast

But returning to the figures for interest in news, it’s worth highlighting that country trends vary meaningfully between the surveys conducted by the RISJ and by GWI.

For example, GWI’s research found that more than half of respondents in the United Kingdom (50.7 percent) were interested in news at the start of 2024, whereas the figure in the RISJ survey is just 38 percent.

Conversely, the RISJ survey found that 57 percent of Indians are interested in news, compared with just 34.9 percent who answered in the affirmative in GWI’s research.

And a marked difference between findings is also apparent for Malaysia, where the RISJ’s research shows 34 percent, but GWI’s data shows 47.1 percent.

One possible explanation for these differences is the context in which survey questions were asked, with the RISJ survey focusing specifically on news, whereas GWI’s survey explores a broad range of interests and online behaviours.

As a result, it’s well worth exploring both datasets, because comparisons between the two may offer insights into how people’s perceptions of the importance and value of news change, depending on the context in which they think about or engage with the question.

One thing that both surveys concur on, however, is that younger people are distinctly less interested in news than their parents’ generation are.

GWI’s data points to an even greater spread across ages though, with just 31.9 percent of people aged 16 to 24 saying they’re interested in news, compared with 67.7 percent for people aged 65 and above [note that data for this older group only includes a subset of GWI’s geographies].

Both surveys also show that men tend to be more interested in news than women.

However, GWI’s global figure suggests this gap is just 3 percentage points, whereas averages for men and women in the RISJ survey are more than 10 percentage points apart.

Seeking out the news

Turning our attention to actual news behaviours, Google Trends data shows that search volumes for news-related content have tumbled over the past 4 years.

It’s perhaps understandable to see interest return to previous levels in 2021 following the huge spike we saw around the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, but the fact that interest has continued to decline at roughly the same rate ever since is somewhat concerning.

Indeed, Google’s tools indicate that the volume of searches for news-related content are now at their lowest level in more than 10 years, and while we’ve seen something of an uptick over the past few months, the overall trendline is still heading downwards.

However, it’s interesting to explore what people have been searching for when they’ve been looking for news-related content over the past year.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ongoing conflict in the Middle East has been a key topic, both in terms of overall share of searches, and also amongst the fastest-growing queries.

But it’s particularly interesting to see that country names are a dominant theme in news searches, and over the past year, 8 of the top 20 searches included an overt reference to a sovereign nation.

Investment-related queries also appear quite frequently in news searches, and the ranking of the world’s fastest-rising queries suggests that people may be taking more of an interest in their personal finances – or at least in market speculation.

Active news avoidance

This year’s research data doesn’t just tell a story of waning interest in news, though; it also shows that an increasing number of people are actively “blocking out” the news.

Across the RISJ survey as a whole, almost 4 in 10 people (39 percent) say that they actively avoid the news at least some of the time, which is only 7 percentage points lower than the figure for people who are actively interested in news.

The number of people who avoid the news has also jumped by more than one-third since 2017, with fewer than 1 in 3 people (29 percent) at that time saying that they made a conscious effort to avoid the news.

Respondents between the ages of 25 and 44 are the most likely to say that they avoid news today, with 42 percent of this cohort reporting such behaviour.

However, comparisons across different data points reveal that people aged 18 to 34 are now more likely to avoid news than they are to be interested in it.

This imbalance is greatest amongst younger respondents, with 40 percent of people aged 18 to 24 saying they actively avoid news, compared with just 34 percent of the same demographic who state an interest in news.

On a relative basis, these figures suggest that – amongst today’s youth – news avoiders outnumber those who are interested in news by more than 17 percent.

Trust in news

Meanwhile, people’s trust in news remains worryingly low, with barely 4 in 10 RISJ respondents saying that they feel they can trust most news, most of the time.

This figure matches the findings in last year’s report, and it’s actually 2 percentage points higher than the survey low of 38 percent that we saw at the height of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

However, the current value of 40 percent is still the joint second-lowest value over the past 9 surveys, so there’s little cheer in these numbers.

There’s a huge disparity in trust across countries though, with people in Finland (69 percent) a full three times more likely than people in Greece and Hungary (23 percent) to say they trust most news, most of the time.

It’s also interesting to note that levels of trust remain remarkably high across the African nations surveyed in this year’s study, with well over half of respondents in Kenya (64 percent), Nigeria (61 percent), and South Africa (57 percent) saying that they believe they can trust most news, most of the time.

At the other end of the spectrum, people in south-eastern Europe remain the most sceptical, with fewer than 3 in 10 people trusting news across Bulgaria (29 percent), Romania (27 percent), Slovakia (25 percent), Greece (23 percent), and Hungary (23 percent).

Overall, young people tend to be less trusting of news compared with older generations, but more than half of respondents in all age groups express misgivings about the current state of news accuracy.

Barely 1 in 3 people aged 25 to 34 (36 percent) say that they trust the news, but that figure only rises to 44 percent amongst respondents aged 55 and above.

Alternative perspective: trust in the media

Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer research takes a slightly broader view of this topic, focusing on trust in the media as a whole, rather than news media specifically.

And interestingly, although Edelman reports that people trust the media less than they trust businesses, NGOs, or governments, trust in media organisations has actually improved over the past decade.

Back in 2015, just 45 percent of respondents said that they felt they could trust the media to “do what is right”, with that figure dipping to just 43 percent in 2017 and 2018.

However, trust in the media grew to a high of 51 percent in 2021, and it has remained at 50 percent since 2022.

Once again though, Edelman reports broadly differing views across countries.

At the top end of the scale, more than three-quarters of Edelman’s 2024 survey respondents in China (77 percent) said that they trust media organisations to “do what is right”, compared with less than one-third of respondents (31 percent) in the UK.

On average, people in Asia tend to be more optimistic about media behaviours, whereas people in Europe and the Americas tend to be more sceptical.

But while half of respondents appear to trust media organisations, Edelman reports that people are considerably less trusting of journalists.

Across the 2024 Trust Barometer survey as a whole, 64 percent of respondents said that they worry journalists and reporters are “purposely trying to mislead people”, with an alarming 79 percent of people in Spain expressing this concern.

Only Swedes and Germans have a generally positive perception of journalists, but even then, 47 percent and 46 percent (respectively) of survey respondents still say that they worry about journalistic integrity.

Concerns about “fake news” and misinformation

Misgivings about news accuracy are apparent in the RISJ data too, with the 2024 Digital News Report finding the highest levels of concern to date.

Almost 6 in 10 respondents to this year’s survey (59 percent) say that they worry about what is real and what is fake on the internet, with that figure increasing by 5 percentage points over the past 2 years.

Average sentiment has varied since 2018 though, with concern reaching 58 percent in 2021, before falling to 54 percent in 2022.

Somewhat alarmingly though, the Reuters Institute’s own analysis of this data suggests that many people apply the “fake news” label to things that merely contradict their world-view, rather than strictly to things that they know to be factually incorrect:

“…audience concerns about misinformation are often driven less by news that is completely ‘made up’, and more by seeing opinions and agendas that they may disagree with.”

As such, it’s important to draw a distinction between “fake news” and outright mis- and disinformation, even if many people appear to use these terms interchangeably.

Google Trends data suggests that worldwide searches for the term “fake news” have declined gently since former US president Trump pushed the phrase into more common parlance in 2017.

However, during the same period, worldwide searches relating to misinformation have increased sharply, and – despite some significant fluctuations over the past few years – associated search volumes are currently five to six times higher than the average we saw between 2010 and 2020.

It’s also important to stress that this chart shows trends for various search terms related to misinformation across numerous languages, so it’s less likely to be skewed by trends in any one country.

Impact for business

As we saw in the Edelman data above, people tend to trust businesses more than they trust media organisations, but even so, marketers should take careful note of their audiences’ growing concerns about the factual accuracy of what they see online.

For example, marketers that rely on delivering factual claims about the benefits or performance of their offerings may want to explore how evolving levels of trust might influence people’s reactions to such messaging.

Meanwhile, marketers who buy placements in news media, and PR professionals who hope to secure features in such outlets, may want to consider how people’s changing perceptions of news content might affect how brands are perceived if they’re frequently associated with news environments.

Where people get their news

Online channels are the primary source of the world’s news, with 77 percent of RISJ respondents saying that they use digital media to access news content.

Men are slightly more likely than women to use digital channels for news, but this may simply reflect the fact that men are typically more interested in news than women, rather than reflecting a meaningful difference in channel affinity between the genders.

Television still ranks second for news though, with more than half of this year’s RISJ respondents (55 percent) saying that they watch news on TV.

Social media ranks third, with more than half of adults saying that they use social platforms specifically to access news.

However, it’s worth noting that women are more likely than men to use social media for news, despite social media being a subset of that 77 percent figure that we saw above for online news overall.

Fewer than 1 in 4 people now use broadcast radio to get their news, but this behaviour is significantly more prevalent amongst men (26 percent) than it is amongst women (21 percent).

But physical print media – once the dominant source of news – now features in the news diets of fewer than 1 in 5 global adults.

Once again though, men are meaningfully more likely than women to read physical newspapers and news magazines, with 22 percent of male respondents reporting use of such media, compared with just 16 percent of female respondents.

Social media for news

Given that it’s the primary entry point for online news, we’ll begin our more detailed examination of news channels with social media, before going on to take a closer look at broader digital news behaviours later in this analysis.

On average, more than half (51 percent) of survey respondents say that they use social media to access news today, but this figure has fallen from 57 percent over the past two years.

That 6 percentage point drop represents a relative decline of more than 10 percent, and the 2024 figure is the lowest we’ve seen in the RISJ data since 2016.

However, social media remains the primary “gateway” to online news, with 29 percent of adults saying that they come across news on social platforms each week.

This compares with 25 percent who say that they primarily find news via search engines, and 22 percent who say that they go directly to a news website or app.

However, it’s important to highlight that these figures show how audiences are “getting” their news, and the associated ratios are starkly different to those we see in referral traffic to news websites.

Indeed, global data from Similarweb shows that barely 2 percent of desktop visits to web domains in the News and Media category between April and June 2024 came via social media referrals, compared with 66 percent from direct visits (e.g. typing a URL into a browser), and 21 percent from organic search.

Semrush offers similar figures too, with the company’s data indicating that social media is only responsible for about 2 percent of global traffic referrals to news websites.

So, as you read the remainder of this section, do keep in mind this difference between “where people get their news”, and “where news sites get their traffic”.

Facebook is the top social media platform for news

The RISJ reports that Facebook remains the world’s top social platform for news, with 37 percent of respondents across the 2024 survey’s 47 countries saying that they’ve used Meta’s largest platform for news in the past week.

Use of Facebook for news has been declining though, and this year’s figure is down by a relative 10 percent compared with the 41 percent that used Facebook for news this time last year.

However, Meta itself may have proactively encouraged this decline.

In particular, the company has already “deprecated” (read: axed) its dedicated News tab in many key markets, and while company announcements claim this move was to “better align investments with products and services people value”, some observers noted that Meta’s actions coincided with governments’ demands for Meta to share more ad revenue with news publishers.

And Facebook’s main Feed hasn’t escaped Meta’s “deprioritisation” of news content either; the company even dropped the word “news” from the feature’s name in 2022, after 16 years of calling it the “Newsfeed”.

News publishers have been particularly badly affected by this recalibration of the platform’s algorithm, with many prominent outlets seeing Facebook referrals eviscerated over recent months.

Comparing Facebook’s share of social media referrals in June 2024 with the platform’s highest share figures for each outlet over the past three years, Similarweb data shows that Facebook’s contribution to desktop traffic has fallen by:

90 percent for El Pais
83 percent for The Guardian
82 percent for the BBC’s global news brand
77 percent for O Globo
77 percent for Der Spiegel
76 percent for Le Monde
76 percent for The Times of India
74 percent for Kompas
69 percent for the BBC’s UK site
56 percent for The New York Times

Similarweb’s social media referral data are only available for desktop activity, but data from Semrush indicates that overall social media referrals to top news websites have also evaporated over recent years.

Across the news sites listed above, Semrush’s data indicates that the total volume of social media referrals on mobile devices fell by an average of 77 percent between the first six months of 2020 and the first six months of 2024.

Worst hit amongst this group was Brazil’s O Globo, which lost more than 90 percent of its social media traffic on mobile devices over the past 4 years, but even the New York Times lost close to 80 percent of mobile referrals from social media sites.

It’s important to reiterate that these Semrush figures reflect total social media referrals on mobile devices, and not just those originating from Facebook.

However, news publishers themselves indicate that the decline in Facebook referrals affects traffic across all devices, so it seems safe to conclude that Facebook’s actions have significantly reduced news brands’ potential to tap into social sharing.

Furthermore, these figures only reflect declines since the start of this decade, and the RISJ’s research indicates that Facebook’s contribution to news traffic has been in decline since 2016.

Is no news good or bad news for Facebook?

But what should we make of these numbers?

While some might argue that Meta should be subject to “must carry” laws when it comes to news, it’s important to remember that Facebook’s primary obligation is to deliver value to its shareholders – not to news brands.

And ultimately – at least within Facebook’s current business model – that involves creating engaging user experiences that ensure people spend longer on the platform, and therefore consume more ads.

But does news fit within such “engaging” Facebook experiences?

As we saw earlier, Meta has stated that it removed its dedicated News tab as “part of an ongoing effort to better align our investments to our products and services people value the most.”

However, this statement may not correlate with what Facebook’s users actually want from the platform.

Interestingly, GWI’s latest survey shows that nearly 6 in 10 Facebook users (58.2 percent) say that they visit the platform specifically to “keep up to date with news and current events”.

Admittedly, this figure falls below the 72.4 percent of users who access Facebook to stay in touch with friends and family, but it still suggests that the majority – i.e. well over half – of active Facebook users still want to see news-like content on the platform.

In other words, contrary to the meaning implied in Meta’s own statement, there’s clear evidence that Facebook’s users do, in fact, place “value” on news content within the platform.

But to be fair to Meta, to a certain extent, users are still seeing news on the platform too.

Despite the collapse of referrals to news brands’ websites, Reuters’s 2024 Digital News Report shows that more than 1 in 3 adults across many of the world’s top economies say they see news on Facebook at least once per week, and that figure is still the highest of any social platform.

However, that average figure masks significant variance across geographies.

At the top end of the spectrum, nearly two in three survey respondents in Thailand (64 percent) said that they’d seen news on Facebook in the past 7 days, and that figure was at least 6 in 10 adults across Nigeria, the Philippines, and Kenya.

On the other hand, just 4 percent of adults in Japan said they saw news on Facebook in the past week, while just 9 percent of respondents in South Korea said the same.

Admittedly, these countries have markedly different social media platform preferences to the rest of the world though, thanks to the dominance of LINE in Japan, and KakaoTalk in South Korea.

But these two countries aren’t alone in seeing lower levels of Facebook news consumption; fewer than 1 in 3 Americans (31 percent) say that they saw news on Facebook during the past seven days, while the same is true of just 17 percent of respondents in the UK.

Younger people are the least likely to say that they saw news on Facebook over the past week, mainly because they tend to use Facebook significantly less than their parents’ generation do [you can find details of Facebook’s user demographics in our accompanying Digital 2024 July Global Statshot Report].

However, despite this “age gap”, more than a quarter of respondents aged 18 to 24 still said that they’d seen news on Facebook during the past week.

And just for clarity, that figure is representative of all survey respondents, not just those who actively use Facebook.

People aged 35 to 54 are the most likely to see news on Facebook, with an average of 4 in 10 people in this age group saying that they saw news on the platform in the seven days prior to participating in the RISJ survey.

So, despite the evident challenges for news brands, it’s clear that Facebook continues to serve as an important source of news for the platform’s users.

However, the RISJ’s data shows that other social platforms are also gaining in importance.

YouTube catching Facebook for news

Around the world, more than 3 in 10 respondents to this year’s Digital News Report survey said that they’d seen news content on YouTube over the past week.

Men are significantly more likely to report seeing news on the platform though, with 35 percent of male respondents answering in the affirmative, compared with just 27 percent of female participants.

Indeed, YouTube is now almost on par with Facebook when it comes to how men get their news, with Meta’s top platform just 1 percentage point ahead of Google’s video platform when it comes to serving news to male audiences each week.

More broadly, YouTube’s role in news is particularly pronounced across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, but it’s less popular across North America.

Europeans seem particularly unlikely to consume news content on YouTube though, with all 19 of the bottom places in this year’s RISJ survey occupied by countries in the region.

However, it’s unclear whether this imbalance is due to audience preferences, or whether Google has made a conscious choice to limit the news content that it serves or recommends to YouTube users in Europe, potentially in response to relentless pressure from EU lawmakers.

The share of the global population getting news from YouTube is relatively consistent across ages though, ranging from 30 percent at the lower and upper ends of the RISJ’s age range, to 32 percent amongst respondents aged 35 to 54.

As such, YouTube’s audience is the most “age balanced” of all the social platforms in the RISJ’s 2024 report, although the distinct difference in use by gender is still worth remembering.

WhatsApp a top choice for news

More than 1 in 5 people (21 percent) now say that they get news via WhatsApp, with men and women equally likely to say that they use the messaging platform for news-related activities.

Once again though, the use of WhatsApp for news varies significantly across markets.

The platform’s role is most pronounced in Africa, with 6 in 10 Kenyans and almost as many Nigerians saying that they’ve consumed news content on WhatsApp in the past week.

Less developed economies top WhatsApp’s news rankings, but it’s interesting to note that 1 in 3 Singaporeans (34 percent) say that they’ve used WhatsApp for news-related activity over the past seven days.

Instagram’s rising role

Somewhat surprisingly, Instagram ranks fourth amongst social media news sources in the 2024 Digital News Report, ahead of more “news-centric” platforms like X (Twitter) and Telegram.

Across the RISJ’s 47 survey countries, 18 percent of respondents say that they’ve used Instagram for news over the past week, although women are meaningfully more likely to do so than men (20 percent versus 16 percent, respectively).

Instagram is especially popular for news in Nigeria and Turkey, where 38 percent of respondents use the platform to access news content each week.

However, just 5 percent of Japanese respondents go to Instagram for news each week, and fewer than 1 in 12 people in the UK – 8 percent – use the platform for this purpose.

Instagram’s news audience is also heavily skewed towards younger audiences.

At a worldwide level, almost 3 in 10 survey respondents aged 18 to 24 (29 percent) say that they use Instagram for news, compared with just 12 percent of respondents aged 55 and above.

TikTok makes the headlines

TikTok has also gained a meaningful place in people’s news repertoires, with roughly 1 in 8 people in this year’s RISJ survey saying that they’ve used the short video platform for news in the past week.

Women are slightly more likely to get their news on the platform, with 14 percent saying they’ve used TikTok for news in the past week, compared with 12 percent of men.

At a country level, the ByteDance platform is particularly popular in Thailand, where almost 4 in 10 (39 percent) say they get news content on TikTok.

People across Europe seem less enthusiastic though, with fewer than 10 percent of respondents across most countries in the region saying that they use TikTok for news each week.

As you might expect, younger people are considerably more likely to say they use TikTok for news, with close to a quarter (23 percent) of respondents aged 18 to 24 adopting this behaviour, compared with just 7 percent of respondents aged 55 and above.

However, even at these levels, people aged 55+ are now just as likely to use TikTok for news as they are to use X (Twitter).

An X-favourite?

Interestingly, X classifies itself as a “news” app in the iOS store – not a social media app – and the platform formerly known as Twitter even holds the top spot in Apple’s US app store ranking for the news category at the time of writing.

However, just 1 in 10 global adults now say that they use X for news each week.

Moreover, while many of the other platforms in the RISJ’s research have seen their news audiences grow over recent years, the share of respondents who say that they get their news on X has actually declined by 3 percentage points compared with the 13 percent that we saw in 2022.

X is still a popular choice for news in Africa though, with 40 percent of Nigerians and 37 percent of Kenyans saying that they use the platform for news each week.

Roughly 1 in 7 people in the USA and UK also continue to use X for news each week, but figures are significantly lower across much of Europe.

But interestingly, when it comes to news, X is most popular amongst younger audiences.

The RISJ’s latest data shows that people aged 18 to 24 are more than twice as likely to use the platform for news than people aged 55 and above, despite the fact that people aged 25 to 34 account for the largest share of X’s advertising audience [you can explore X demographics in more detail in our Digital 2024 July Global Statshot Report].

Top digital news brands

But what about the organisations that produce the news people see across these channels?

The next section of this analysis explores the individual news brands that reach the greatest share of the online population, excluding audiences in China, where many of these brands remain blocked by the country’s “Great Firewall”.

It’s also worth noting that we’ve removed some of the answer options from the relevant question in GWI’s survey (e.g. Discovery Channel and ESPN), to provide a more representative comparison across brands that focus specifically on news.

World’s most salient news brands

GWI’s latest data shows that the UK’s BBC holds the highest awareness amongst global news brands, with close to 7 in 10 respondents aged 16 and above (69.0 percent) saying that they’ve heard of the brand.

CNN ranks second, with 66.9 percent of survey respondents recognising the American news brand.

And NBC News ranks third, although the brand has significantly lower awareness than the top two brands, with just 46 percent of respondents saying they’ve heard of the brand.

News brands with the highest attributed reach

However, when it comes to people actually seeing online content from news brands, GWI’s ranking looks a little different.

For context, it’s worth noting that this ranking includes brands’ content that may have been served across various environments, including social media platforms, the brands’ own websites and apps, and services such as news aggregators (e.g. Flipboard and Apple News).

The latest data suggests that CNN has the largest recent reach amongst news brands, but at just 24.6 percent, fewer than 1 in 4 respondents say that they’ve seen content from the CNN brand over the past month.

BBC News ranks second, with 21.5 percent telling GWI that they’ve seen content from the brand during the past 30 days.

Once again though, there’s a big drop to the third brand in this ranking, with just 12.3 percent of respondents saying that they’ve seen news from The New York Times in the past month – just half the number that saw news content from top-ranked CNN.

Top news websites

Similarweb’s data offers a different perspective on news reach, allowing us to explore audiences who actively seek out content on news-centric websites across desktop and mobile devices.

Yahoo! tops the ranking with an average of 425 million unique monthly visitors between April and June 2024.

It’s worth highlighting that Yahoo!’s home page is also a gateway to a variety of “non-news” content, such as the platform’s email and search services, and news may not be the primary attraction for all of the site’s unique visitors.

However, news content still dominates the yahoo.com landing page, so – while Yahoo! may not be a “pure play” news brand – the brand remains one of the top sources of news discovery for the world’s internet users.

And that’s the case for second-ranked QQ.com too, which attracted an average of 163 million monthly active users between April and June

In many ways, the Tencent brand’s Chinese-language site mirrors yahoo.com, acting as a gateway to a variety of different services such as email, games, and search.

However, just as we see with Yahoo!, QQ’s landing page is dominated by the latest news headlines, and as such, the site acts as a primary source of news discovery, even if the majority of the stories it carries are aggregated from third-party news brands.

The BBC is the world’s highest-ranked news-centric brand according to Similarweb’s data, with the UK’s national broadcaster attracting an average of 150 million unique visitors to its “.com” domain over the past three months.

However, it’s important to highlight that this figure does not include the brand’s home audience, with bbc.com only serving international audiences. Instead, UK audiences go to bbc.co.uk, where they’re served a different mix of content without advertising.

Fourth-ranked MSN is another web portal, and – just like Yahoo! and QQ – its landing page acts as a gateway to other Microsoft services such as email and the Office suite of productivity tools.

However, the site’s 148 million unique monthly visitors are also greeted by a range of news headlines upon landing on the site’s homepage, so – even if they came looking for something else – there’s a good chance they’ll get a serving of news into the bargain.

And The New York Times’s website rounds out the top five, with the publisher’s primary web domain attracting an average of 145 million unique monthly visitors during the second quarter of 2024.

However, despite attracting 5 million fewer total visitors than the BBC’s international website, it’s interesting to note that the New York Times’s website attracts a significantly greater number of overall visits, and also serves more content to each visitor.

Simialrweb’s data suggests that bbc.com sees an average of 490 million total visits per month, and with each visit involving an average of 2.43 page views, the site serves roughly 1.2 billion page views each month.

In contrast, nytimes.com attracted an average of 660 million visits per month over the past quarter, and at an average of 3.03 page views per visit, that equates to roughly 2 billion total page views per month.

For comparison, these figures suggest that nytimes.com serves more than 1½ times as many total pages as bbc.com does, despite those differences in unique visitor numbers.

However, it’s worth remembering that the BBC’s home audience – which isn’t reflected in its “.com” traffic – makes a big difference.

Similarweb’s data suggests that bbc.co.uk attracts 575 million total visits per month, even though its unique audience only includes about 70 million monthly visitors.

And based on these figures, it seems likely that the BBC’s news offerings reach many more individuals than those of any other “dedicated” news brand.

Top news apps

That hypothesis is borne out by the latest figures from data.ai (recently acquired by Sensor Tower), which suggest that the BBC News app attracted more than twice as many monthly active users as the NYTimes app did between April and June 2024.

Neither app ranks in data.ai’s top ten for the second quarter of this year though, with aggregator apps claiming the greatest share of news activity.

Google News is by far the most popular news app outside of China, claiming almost twice as many monthly active users as its next nearest rival.

India’s Daily Hunt app ranks second, but it’s worth highlighting that more than 99 percent of the app’s active users live in India.

The same is true of third-ranked Hindi News by Dainik Bhaskar too, with almost all of the Indian news app’s active users living within its home market.

However, this domestic audience is still large enough to rank Hindi News at the top of the world’s non-aggregator news apps in this latest data.

Yahoo! Japan’s app ranks fourth, which is testament to the brand’s enduring popularity in the Land of the Rising Sun.

As might be expected, however, Yahoo! Japan’s audience is also heavily concentrated in just one country, and barely 1 in every 1,000 of the app’s active users lives outside of Japan.

And lastly for this section, the NewsBreak app places fifth, with the American local news aggregator placing well ahead of apps from brands like Fox News, CNN, and The New York Times.

Just as with the previous three apps in this ranking though, almost all of NewsBreak’s audience is concentrated in its domestic market, with just 1 percent of the app’s active users living outside of the United States.

Top news brands on social media

Given that the RISJ’s latest data shows that social media acts as the primary gateway to news, it’s also important to understand which brands have gained the greatest momentum on the world’s top social platforms.

However, it’s tricky to identify how many people actually see each news brand’s content on most social channels, because this data isn’t typically publicly available.

As a result, we’ve focused our attention on the number of users that follow or subscribe to individual news brands on a variety of top platforms.

This data isn’t perfect, however, because it doesn’t factor important details such as a brand’s publishing frequency, or the role of potential organic reach within each platform’s algorithm – or the lack thereof.

And critically, this data doesn’t distinguish between brands that have built a following through organic interest, and those that have invested heavily in advertising to build their followership.

However, the “raw” findings that this data provide are still exceptionally valuable, and in some cases, the caveats detailed above actually render the findings even more interesting.

Top news Pages on Facebook

And nowhere is this more apparent than in the ranking of top news brands on Facebook.

As we saw earlier, Facebook remains the most important social medium for news around the world, with 37 percent of RISJ respondents saying that they’ve used the Meta platform to access news content within the past week.

However, it’s important to remember that – like most international social media – Facebook remains blocked in China.

Admittedly, some people in China may use tools like VPNs to circumvent Great Firewall restrictions, but Meta’s own data suggest that just 1.5 million people in China saw ads on Facebook in June 2024, which suggests that barely 1 in every 1,000 people living in China currently access the platform each month.

You can find comprehensive data for more general Facebook use around the world in our Digital 2024 July Global Statshot Report, including the chart shown below.

But despite the fact that the Chinese government continues to block Facebook access for its own citizens, Chinese state-controlled media actually occupy all of the top five places in the ranking of news brands on Facebook.

However, it appears that the audiences amassed by these five Chinese news brands have been built largely through Facebook advertising, and each Page has continued to use Facebook’s paid placements to amplify posts’ reach in July 2024.

CGTN claims top spot in this year’s ranking, with the English-language international arm of the China Global Television Network building a Facebook followership of 122 million.

China Daily ranks second, with the English-language newspaper brand’s Facebook Page claiming 114 million followers around the world.

Rounding out the top five are China Xinhua News (97 million followers), People’s Daily, China (84 million followers), and Global Times (77 million followers).

Each of these top five brands has continued to grow its following over the past year too, with data published on facebook.com showing that:

CGTN has added 2 million followers
China Daily has added 6 million followers
China Xinhua News has added 3 million followers
People’s Daily, China has added 1 million followers
Global Times has added 3 million followers

The resulting follower totals are enough to place CGTN and China Daily in the top 10 Pages overall on Facebook, and all five Pages appear in the global top 40 [note that the chart below is taken from our Digital 2024 July Global Statshot Report].

BBC News is the first entry to appear on our list of news brands that is not managed by Chinese state-controlled media, with the UK broadcaster’s Facebook Page now claiming 61 million followers.

The number of users following the BBC News Facebook Page has grown by 1 million over the past year, but it’s worth highlighting that it too continues to invest in Facebook ads, including numerous paid placements that launched within the past month.

Unilad and LADbible claim the next two spots in this year’s ranking, with figures published on facebook.com putting the sibling brands on even footing at 50 million followers.

However, through a bit of sleuthing, we’ve identified that Unilad is still just ahead of its stablemate, with the brand’s Facebook Page claiming 50.8 million followers, compared with the 50.2 million users following LADbible.

CNN takes ninth spot amongst the top news brands on Facebook with 40 million followers, while India’s Aaj Tak rounds out the top ten, with 36 million followers.

Across the 30 top Pages that we’ve identified in this year’s ranking, just 14 publish primarily English-language content, while a further two publish content in a mix of English and Filipino.

Here’s how the remaining Pages break down by primary publishing language:

Hindi: 4 Pages
Arabic: 4 Pages
Urdu: 2 Pages
Burmese: 2 Pages
Bengali: 2 Pages

Each of the news Pages in the Facebook top 30 ranking now has at least 20 million followers on Facebook alone, but it’s worth highlighting that these follower counts do not guarantee that each Page’s content reaches all users in the Page’s audience.

Indeed, the latest data from SocialInsider suggests that – on average – the typical Facebook post will reach less than 6 percent of the publishing Page’s followers without paid media support.

Top news accounts on YouTube

The researchers at the Reuters Institute emphasised the importance of video in their analysis of this year’s data, and with YouTube now used by nearly 1 in 3 survey respondents (31 percent) for news each week, Google’s primary video platform is an increasingly central part of the digital news mix.

Indians are particularly likely to visit YouTube for news, and one of the country’s news brands – Aaj Tak – even features in our latest ranking of the top 30 YouTube channels overall [note that the chart below is taken from our Digital 2024 July Global Statshot Report].

Meanwhile, the top four places in our selection of top news brands on YouTube are all claimed by Indian brands.

Aaj Tak’s 66.1 million subscribers make it the clear leader at a worldwide level, with its YouTube audience almost 1½ times the size of its next nearest rival.

ABP News comes in second in this year’s ranking, with 44.3 million subscribers on its main channel.

However, ABP Live appears in sixth place in our analysis, and while there’s likely plenty of overlap between these two audiences, the live channel’s 28.5 million subscribers are further testament to the apparent strength of the ABP brand.

India TV ranks third, just behind ABP News on 42.2 million subscribers, while Zee news claims fourth spot, with 36.7 million subscribers.

And YouTube’s own news aggregation channel rounds out the top five, with 36.1 million subscribers.

However, it’s worth noting that this aggregation channel features videos sourced directly from the YouTube channels of a wide variety of different news brands, and in most cases, the channel appears to prioritise channels that are based in the viewer’s home country.

In this sense, YouTube’s @News channel operates in a manner similar to “must carry” content on traditional TV channels.

Looking more broadly across our selection of 30 large news accounts, we see a good mix of news brands from around the world.

As one might expect, some of the global heavyweights rank particularly well, but it’s interesting to note that the BBC’s Hindi-language channel has gained more subscribers (18.9 million) than its primary English-language account (16.3 million).

Likewise, the audience of Indonesia’s Kompas TV is the same size as that of Al Jazeera’s primary Arabic-language channel (17.5 million), and Kompas TV actually ranks ahead of both ABC News (17.0 million) and CNN (16.6 million).

But in addition to subscriber counts, YouTube also publishes total channel views, and these cumulative figures also make for interesting reading.

Aaj Tak tops the ranking by total channel views too, having amassed an impressive 32.8 billion video views at the time of writing.

Zee News ranks second with 22.2 billion views, and India TV ranks third, with 20.8 billion.

Total view counts are unavailable for Google’s aggregated news channel, but the combined view count across the other 29 channels in this year’s analysis comes to a staggering 351.6 billion.

These figures offer some interesting perspectives for the commercial side of the news business, with Google continuing to share YouTube advertising revenue with brands that choose to “monetise” their content.

The value of advertising can vary significantly by the viewer’s country, but nonetheless – even at lower CPMs – there’s potential for some of these top news brands to earn meaningful additional revenue from YouTube advertising should they choose to do so.

Having said that, the revenues paid out by YouTube will almost always be significantly lower than the CPMs that the same brands could command on their owned digital properties, and it seems unlikely that YouTube ad revenues alone would be able to sustain the operations of a large news brand.

YouTube ads reach large audiences in many countries around the world however, so they can deliver a useful addition to other revenues [note that the chart below is taken from our Digital 2024 July Global Statshot Report].

Top news accounts on Instagram

Nearly 1 in 5 respondents to this year’s RISJ survey said that they’d visited Instagram to seek out news content in the past seven days, making it the fourth most “popular” social platform for news content.

As we saw earlier, Instagram is a particularly popular choice amongst women, and its audience also skews towards younger age groups.

However, data published on instagram.com suggests that news is still a “minority” motivation for using Instagram.

We’ve only focused on news organisations for our ranking though, so individual journalists and “influencers” who talk about news do not feature in our analysis.

For initial perspective, it’s worthing noting that the three largest accounts on Instagram overall – @Instagram, @Cristiano (Ronaldo), and @LeoMessi – all have more than half a billion followers.

Meanwhile, the fortieth-ranked account in this overall list – @NASA – has close to 100 million followers [note that the chart below is taken from our Digital 2024 July Global Statshot Report].

However, the top news brand on Instagram – @BBCNews – has fewer than 28 million followers at the time of writing.

That figure isn’t even half as big as it would need to be to rank in the platform’s top 100, where the cutoff currently sits at more than 57 million.

However, despite these comparatively low numbers, the mix of news brands that people follow on Instagram is still particularly interesting.

For example, the second-largest news account by Instagram followers in July 2024 appears to be @BBCPersian, which offers a range of international news content with Persian-language commentary.

The account has close to 21 million followers at the time of writing, which is particularly impressive when we consider that estimates put the total number of Persian speakers at just 130 million.

CNN claims third spot in our 2024 ranking, and is the only other news brand we’ve been able to identify that has built more than 20 million followers on Instagram.

The New York Times places fourth, with 18.2 million followers, while LADbible rounds out the top 5, with just over 14 million followers.

However, Chinese state-controlled media are conspicuous only by their absence in this ranking, with none of the five brands that dominated our Facebook ranking attracting more than 2.5 million followers on Instagram at the time of writing.

Top news accounts on TikTok

This year’s RISJ Digital News Report shows that news is gaining importance amongst TikTok’s users, but news brands appear to have struggled to build a following on the platform.

Once again, we’ve focused our attention on news organisations for this list, so individual journalists and “influencers” like Hugo Travers (@hugodecrypte) do not appear, even if their follower numbers are larger than those of some of the brands that we have included.

It’s also worth noting that the intricacies of ByteDance’s algorithm mean that follower counts are somewhat less important on TikTok than they are on platforms like Instagram and X, because TikTok’s “For You” feed serves a variety of content from across the platform, regardless of whether the user actually follows any of the associated accounts.

Amongst those accounts that met our criteria to be considered a “news brand”, @LADbible has built the largest following on TikTok, but the account still has fewer than 14 million followers at the time of writing, and is the only news brand with more than 10 million TikTok followers.

For added perspective, the largest account on TikTok overall – @khaby.lane – has close to 163 million followers in July 2024, while an account currently needs more than 31 million followers to rank amongst the top 100.

The UK’s @DailyMail ranks second amongst news brands on TikTok, with 9.4 million followers, followed by Saudi Arabia’s state-owned Al Arabiya, which has 9 million.

Filipino news brand @ABSCBN claims fourth position in our 2024 ranking with 8 million followers, and Indonesia’s @OfficialiNews completes the top five, with 7.8 million followers.

Looking across the rest of the top 30, it’s particularly interesting to note that “traditional” news brands have struggled to gain momentum.

Of the remaining 25 brands not detailed above, only a handful belong to large “Western” news organisations, while various local news outlets from across South-East Asia, the Middle East, and Southern America appear to be performing particularly well.

It’s also interesting to note that one of the Chinese state-controlled brands that dominated our Facebook rankings made it to the TikTok top 30 too, with @PeoplesDaily landing at joint-28th place alongside America’s @CBSNews and Japan’s @TV_Asahi_News.

However, the extent to which content produced by news brands makes it into people’s TikTok feeds is unclear.

For example, recent videos published by top-ranked LADbible have achieved anywhere from 10,000 views to well over a million, but roughly 1 in 3 of the account’s 100 most recent posts have delivered fewer than 100,000 views.

Top news accounts on X

Despite not ranking amongst the the top five social platforms for news in the RISJ’s latest research, news brands perform far better on X than they do on either Instagram or TikTok.

This may partly be due to the fact that the platform formerly known as Twitter actively positions itself as an outlet for news, but whatever the reason, three news brands also rank in X’s overall top 30 in July 2024 [note that the chart below is taken from our Digital 2024 July Global Statshot Report].

CNN’s breaking news account, @CNNBRK, has the largest following of any news brand on X at the time of writing, at close to 64 million.

Meanwhile, the brand’s “main” account – @CNN – follows in second place, with 62.5 million followers.

The New York Times ranks third with 55.2 million followers, and that’s sufficient to place the brand 24th in our latest overall X ranking too.

The BBC’s @BBCBreaking account ranks fourth amongst news brands, with 51.7 million followers, while the brand’s international news feed, @BBCWorld, rounds out the top five, with 40.8 million followers.

However, despite the decidedly Western flavour to the platform’s top five, news brands from around the world also appear to do well on X.

For example, a total of seven Arabic-language accounts feature in this year’s top 30, alongside three outlets from India.

Paying for news content

The RISJ offers a comprehensive analysis of trends in the commercial aspects of news in its latest report, so – rather than replicate that analysis here – we’d recommend reading their valuable commentary.

However, for completeness, it’s worth noting that fewer than 1 in 6 respondents to the RISJ’s 2024 survey (16 percent) say that they pay for some form of digital news content.

That overall figure has inched up from last year’s 15 percent, but this year’s low figure shows that most people still expect the news to be free – or at least that people don’t currently value news enough to pay for it.

It’s worth noting that payment data isn’t available for all markets in the RISJ’s survey though, and data for many of the least developed economies in the latest research sample is sadly unavailable.

Despite those gaps though, the available data still reveal meaningful differences by country, with people in Norway roughly five times more likely to pay for news than people in the UK.

The UK is perhaps an outlier when it comes to “paying” for news though, because the country’s most popular news brand – the BBC – continues to be supported by the country’s television licensing scheme, which requires everyone in the country who owns a television to pay close to GBP £170 (≈USD $220) per year.

As such, many people in the UK may feel that they already “pay” for news, and are therefore less willing to pay for additional digital perspectives beyond those they get through the BBC.

But low levels of willingness to pay for online content aren’t unique to the United Kingdom, and just 9 percent of Japanese respondents say that they currently pay for some form of digital news.

Once again though, Japan’s situation may be distorted by the fact that most Japanese households still subscribe to physical print newspapers, which may impact their subsequent willingness to pay for online news content as well.

It’s also particularly interesting to note that the willingness to pay for digital news falls with age, despite older generations expressing far greater interest in news overall.

The 2024 RISJ survey found that just 1 in 8 people aged 55 and above (13 percent) pay for some form of digital news today, compared with 1 in 5 people aged 18 to 24 (20 percent).

Alternative perspective: paying for digital news content

However, GWI’s data offers an even gloomier outlook for the business side of digital news.

The company’s Q1 2024 survey found that fewer than 1 in 10 adult internet users currently pays for online news content each month, with that figure falling over recent years.

Note that this question in GWI’s survey specifically references payments made within the past month though, so people who pay annually for a digital news subscription may not answer in the affirmative, even if they currently have an active, paid digital news subscription.

Interestingly, none of GWI’s top-ranked countries feature in the payments data in this year’s RISJ research, so this GWI data provides a valuable perspective on the previous dataset.

It’s particularly interesting to note that the world’s two most populous countries – India and China – top the rankings, with roughly 1 in 7 online adults in both countries saying that they currently pay for at least some form of online news.

The UK comes out slightly higher in GWI’s research than it does in the RISJ’s numbers, but Japan still languishes near the bottom of GWI’s rankings, with barely 2.6 percent of internet users aged 16 and above saying that they pay for online news today.

GWI’s data also offers a slightly different take on differences by age, although the overall theme is similar to the one we saw in the RISJ data.

GWI found that people aged 25 to 44 are the most likely to pay for digital news, with the youngest cohort (16 to 24s) somewhat more frugal when it comes to paying for online content.

However, this alternative dataset reinforces the idea that older generations are significantly less likely to pay for digital news, with just 3½ percent of people over the age of 65 in a subset of survey countries saying that they currently pay for online news service.

GWI’s data also shows that digital news is a lower priority when it comes to paying for digital content overall.

For comparison, more than three times as many GWI respondents have paid for a movie or TV streaming service in the past month than have paid for a digital news subscription (30.2 percent versus 9.5 percent, respectively), while more than twice as many have paid for a music streaming subscription (22.1 percent).

And somewhat surprisingly, people are still more willing to pay for music downloads than they are to pay for news, which suggests that the news industry still has significant work to do to recalibrate commercial propositions [note that the chart below is taken from our Digital 2024 July Global Statshot Report].

But when we take a closer look at the data by age, another interesting trend emerges.

As we saw earlier, older generations are significantly less likely to pay for digital news content, but they’re also less likely to pay for any kind of digital content overall.

Indeed, GWI’s data suggest that nearly three-quarters (73.1 percent) of internet users between the ages of 16 and 24 have paid for at least one kind of digital content over the past month, which is almost twice as many as the 38.3 percent of internet users over the age of 65 who say the same.

However, in terms of priority, older generations place the greatest relative importance on news of any age group.

News services rank fourth amongst people aged 65 and above when it comes to paying for digital content, whereas these services only rank tenth amongst users aged 16 to 34 [note that the chart below is taken from our Digital 2024 July Global Statshot Report].

Diversity may be the answer

Meanwhile, across digital content as a whole, it’s particularly interesting to note that aggregators top the brands that people of all ages actually pay for.

For example, more than 4 in 10 adult internet users outside of China told GWI that they use a premium Netflix account [note that the chart featured above for Digital Content Purchases includes data for China, which is why this Netflix figure appears higher than the figure shown there for movie and TV streaming services overall].

This Netflix figure is twice as high as the number who pay for either Disney+ or Disney+ Hotstar, which suggests that paying subscribers place particular importance on the breadth of content available on any given platform.

Meanwhile, when it comes to digital music, 18.7 percent of GWI’s survey base outside of China says that they use a premium Spotify subscription.

As an aside, this figure equates to roughly 400 million people, which is significantly more than the 246 million paying subscribers that Spotify reported in its recent Q2 2024 investor earning announcement.

This mismatch may indicate that some people “share” a paid Spotify subscription, with some people able to access the premium service tier even if they don’t pay for it themselves.

Either way though, it’s worth highlighting that these services offer the broadest range of content in their given industry vertical.

And this reinforces the findings that we explored in the mobile apps section of this analysis, where news aggregators dominated the ranking.

News app revenues

However, when we look at the brands that top the paid rankings in data.ai’s News & Magazines category, a quite different story emerges.

It’s important to note that these figures only reflect users’ in-app purchases, so they don’t include subscriptions purchased via an alternative channel (e.g. on the brand’s website), even if those subscriptions are then used to log in to a mobile app.

However, the brands that top app store revenue in the news category are all mono-brand offerings.

The New York Times topped the worldwide rankings between April and June 2024, followed by The Wall Street Journal, and then The Nikkei.

The Guardian ranked fourth, while Le Monde placed fifth.

Only one aggregator – Readly, a Swedish magazine aggregator – made the top ten, and there’s only one more aggregator service in the top 20.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about this data is just how little money the world spends on news subscriptions, with only one app within this top 20 achieving lifetime average revenue per download of more than ten US dollars.

For clarity, that’s the average that each user has spent since they downloaded the app – not how much they’ve spent within the past month or year.

Once again, it’s critical to stress that these figures only include in-app purchases, and they likely significantly underestimate total subscription revenues.

Indeed, Nieman Lab reports that The New York Times alone earned more than USD $1 billion from subscriptions in 2023.

However, it’s still interesting to note that the News & Magazines category captured just 1.2 percent of total in-app spend across the iOS and Google Play stores during Q2 2024.

Moreover, when it comes to revenue growth, the News & Magazines category was the joint poorest performer over the past year, with total consumer spend only increasing by 3 percent in the 12 months to June 2024.

Perspectives on payments and priorities

Let’s take a moment to put these trends in perspective.

data.ai intelligence shows that Americans alone spent close to USD $1.5 billion on in-app purchases of TikTok Coins in the 12 months ended June 2024, and while these coins can be used for a few different purposes, the most common is to buy and send “virtual gifts” to the platform’s content creators.

Creators can subsequently redeem these gifts for fiat currency, but app stores typically take 30 percent of Coins’ purchase price at source, and Bytedance also takes a 50-percent cut of what’s left, so creators may only see one-third of what consumers actually pay for these gifts.

Techcrunch reports that the most common purchase of TikTok coins is a USD $19.99 bundle, which it says accounts for roughly a quarter of the app’s revenue.

But it’s important to remember that the TikTok platform remains free to use, and there is absolutely no obligation for any user to purchase these TikTok coins.

In other words, the 1½ billion dollars that Americans paid for TikTok coins over the past year was entirely discretionary.

Moreover, the $19.99 bundle is one of the more expensive options, and users are able to buy smaller bundles of coins for significantly less money should they wish to do so.

But it’s the dynamic of gifting these coins that has the greatest significance in this analysis.

To be clear, sending virtual gifts in TikTok is similar to the act of tipping a street busker; audiences feel that they’ve received some kind of value from a creator, and they have chosen to reward them financially for that value.

But the fact that Americans spent roughly 7½ times as much on TikTok coins as they did on in-app purchases across the whole of the News & Magazine category during the past year is profound.

Moreover, the value of TikTok coin purchases in the USA alone amounts to roughly 1.3 times the value of The New York Times’s total global subscriptions – and that NYT figure includes physical subscription revenue.

Conclusions on the news business model

So what can we learn from this financial data?

Well, for me, the clear takeaway is that news brands continue to struggle with articulating a compelling value proposition for the digital age.

For much of its history, the news industry earned a significant proportion of its revenues from advertising, but the internet has completely broken that model – at least for individual news brands.

Meanwhile, audiences are less interested in what news brands are delivering, and they’re also less trusting of that content.

However, as we’ve already seen in this analysis, people still seem to want news, with more than half of the world’s 5.45 billion internet users saying that “keeping up to date with news and events” is one of the primary reasons why they go online.

For me, this points to two primary issues:

News brands aren’t delivering the “digital product” that people want, even though those people appear to have a genuine desire for digital news content; and
Most people are unwilling to pay for news in the way that it’s currently being delivered, even though those people have demonstrated ample willingness to pay for digital subscriptions, and also to offer discretionary financial rewards to creators that publish digital content.

On reflection, I don’t believe that the solution is to “educate” audiences on the importance of paying for quality journalism.

Equally, the levels of interest and trust that we’ve explored in this analysis suggests that the descent into sensationalism has done more damage than good, and while “click-bait” headlines may have propped up ad revenues in the short term, this approach is almost certainly unsustainable.

As a result, I think the news industry needs to fundamentally rethink how it packages and monetises news content in a manner that addresses people’s actual interests and behaviours.

Evidence from other digital content categories suggests that aggregation may offer a potential solution, but I suspect such aggregation might result in the demise of many of today’s news brands, in much the same way as we’ve seen many cable TV brands struggle in the transition to streaming.

However, we’ve also seen that people are willing to pay for digital content, so the question for the news industry is “how”, not “if”.

AI and the outlook for news

But to wrap up this year’s analysis, let’s turn our attention to artificial intelligence (AI).

There’s little doubt that generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney are already reshaping the news landscape, but the rapid advance of these technologies over recent months suggests that we’ve only begun to experience the impact that AI tools will have on news (not to mention the rest of our lives).

However, it’s particularly difficult to identify how many people are making “conscious” use of AI tools today.

Unlike social media platforms, which tend to be “destinations” like mobile apps websites, many current applications of AI technology work “behind the scenes” in other products and services.

For example, Microsoft’s Copilot technology is increasingly being integrated into the company’s Windows offerings, rather than being a standalone service like ChatGPT.

The same is true of Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite of products, with generative AI tools now available within programs like Photoshop and Illustrator.

As a result, there’s no easy way to discern how many people actually use these technologies, as opposed to merely having access to them.

For perspective though, data from Similarweb shows that chatgpt.com attracted an average of more than 300 million unique monthly visitors in June 2024, with total site visits up by more than 14 percent compared with the previous month.

Meanwhile, intelligence from data.ai indicates that ChatGPT’s mobile app had more than 180 million active users in June 2024, with that figure also showing impressive month-on-month growth.

There will likely be significant overlaps between users of the service’s website and its mobile app, but trends in the available data suggest that ChatGPT may pass the half-billion active users mark sometime in 2025.

Reading between the (head)lines

The potential benefits of AI tools in newsrooms are clear, especially given the imperative to find more cost-efficient ways of working.

As the RISJ team highlighted in its analysis of these year’s research,

“In the last year, we have seen media companies deploying a range of AI solutions, with varying degrees of human oversight. [Some] publishers… now include AI-generated ‘bullet points’ at the top of many of their titles’ stories to increase engagement. One German publisher uses an AI robot… to write more than 5 percent of its published stories, while others have deployed tools such as Midjourney or OpenAI’s Dall-E for automating graphic illustrations.”

It seems inevitable that the use of these tools in news environments will increase too, especially as video capabilities improve.

But AI advances may also affect audiences’ news behaviours, and tools like Perplexity have particularly important implications for news brands – especially when it comes to revenues.

For example, whilst Perplexity provides hyperlinks to its cited source content, it also offers a clear and concise summary of the requested content within its own platform.

These summaries may not always be up to date, so can be less useful for breaking headlines or recent news, but they’re often sufficient for less time-sensitive queries.

Moreover, the underlying technology is still in its infancy, and if we consider the impact that real-time news analysis has already had on industries like investment banking, it seems likely that we’ll also see rapid advances in public-facing AI news aggregators too.

F(ai)thful reporting

But our analysis of the content returned by some of today’s most popular AI tools suggests that they’re frequently responsible for “fact laundering”.

More specifically, we’ve witnessed numerous instances where AI tools have referenced poorly fact-checked source content – which in turn cites dubious research and statistics – only to position the resulting summaries as credible and authoritative.

It’s important to acknowledge that the AI tools themselves are not responsible for these inaccuracies though; they’re merely responsible for implementing processes and algorithms that lead to the subsequent citation of inaccurate content.

And similarly, this outcome may not be significantly different to today’s news reality, where search engines may return inaccurate content at the top of users’ search results.

However, with trust in news already at worryingly low levels, there’s a real danger that AI will only serve to exacerbate current declines.

As such, it is incumbent upon us all – as consumers of news, as journalists, or as media owners – to champion news environments that advance society, and not merely those that harness advances in technology.