Main news source by age, online vs. television

In particular, younger audiences are driving the ttransition of video to the smaller screen. According to the Reuters Institute’s “Digital News Report 2013”, television viewership in the 18- to 24-year-old and 25-to 34-year-old categories is half of the viewership of those 55+. Conversely, the younger age groups make up the
lion’s share of usership online, and represents almost 2.5
times that of those 55+. The study was conducted in the United States, Brazil, Japan and six European countries.

Gfk corroborates the findings in the United Kingdom, saying 16- to 24-year-olds are the primary users of online news video, despite having an overall lower engagement with news in general compared to their older counterparts.

Gfk explored the reasons why British news users access news video, and found that 85 percent said video brings the story to life, 77 percent say video improves the understanding of the story, and 61 percent makes the news easier to follow. Younger age groups tended to favor video news more than older news users, with 92 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds saying video brings the story to life, while 85 percent of those 65+ said so.

In Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom, more than half of news users also access video news, according to Gfk research in 2013. Of all news users in Spain, 89 percent are also online news users and 72 percent are video news users, while in the United Kingdom, of all news consumers, 86 percent video in the past month on tablets and 20 percent on smartphones, while 24.6 percent said they viewed video one to three times per month on tablets and 10.3 percent on smartphones. For the most avid users of video, 9.5 percent of the respondents said they viewed video once a day on tablets and 2.9 percent on smartphone, while 18.9 percent watched video on tablets at least once a week and 6.7 percent on smartphones in 2012.

The data set is a part of a collection of 500 revenue and usership trends in mobile, social, Internet, tablet, video and other digital categories, published in the 200-page Global Digital Media Trendbook 2013. GDMT, in its eight year, is to be published by World Newsmedia Network, a not-for-profit media research company, in September 2013. To subscribe to the PDF report and/or the tablet edition, go to www.wnmn.org, or contact mstone@wnmn.org.