Hi everyone,

I have now collated the results from the online news consumption survey that a lot of you kindly completed for us. I thought I would share the results with you. I have broken the results into three parts. Here is Part 1:

Part 1 – News consumption
In total we had 33 responses to the online news consumption survey. I have broken the respondents down into three groups according to their level of online news consumption:

Group Consumption per day Respondents

Light < 30 mins 12
Medium 30 – 59 mins 11
Heavy > 60 mins 10

Eight of the respondents where from North America. In general North American respondents followed different news sources (as would be expected) but also they were more likely to read blogs. In general there was a surprisingly high consensus in the answers to most questions (apart from interests).

Overall consumption
On average respondents spent about 42 minutes per day reading news online and checking it on average 4.3 times per day. Heavy news consumers checked 6.3 times per day on average.

Reasons for consumption
The top three reasons why respondents follow news were (all respondents):

Reason	% scored 4 or 5
I feel a need to keep up to date	75%
I enjoy it	44%
I wouldn’t want to miss something that was important to me	41%

For heavy news consumers the top three were:

Reason	% scored 4 or 5
I feel a need to keep up to date	58%
I need it in order to do my job well	58%
I enjoy it	42%

Thoughts: I think it is very interesting that people have an intrinsic need for news, beyond mere enjoyment or some utilitarian purpose. The jobs of the respondents who need news do their job well were consultants, traders and journalists.

Interests

All news consumers:

Topic	% scored 4 or 5
Technology	64%
Business	58%
World	52%
Politics	42%
General	42%

 

Heavy news consumers:

Topic	% scored 4 or 5
Technology	83%
Business	75%
World	58%
Politics	42%
Sport	33%

Thoughts: This is obviously influenced by the unscientific way we’ve conducted this survey. However it does suggest that Tech, Biz, World and Politics should be our lead categories. I would expect Sport, Entertainment, Economics, General and Science to be our second tier categories.

Please do give your comments below. I will post the second part of the findings (Respondents current online news experience) on Monday.

Nigel

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tags: news, news survey

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 1st, 2007 at 12:03 am and is filed under Interesting stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.