Other sources of news and current affairs include colleagues, friends, and family, with less than 30 percent of news audiences in the EMEA region using printed newspapers as their main news source. With so many free options available, purchasing newspapers is no longer the most appealing or efficient news source for modern audiences, and most consumers choose to get their news for free.
Paid news content
Like others around the world, Europeans are not generally inclined to pay for news. A study showed that most news audiences reported never accessing online or print news via a subscription service, although almost 20 percent of consumers in Sweden reported using a news subscription service every day, a stark contrast to participants from other countries.Meanwhile, mobile news apps are growing in popularity. Spending on mobile news apps in Europe grew by more than 50 percent between 2019 and 2020, suggesting that news apps could soon become the preferred option for consumers willing to pay for news content.
News apps usage in Europe
Data shows that the most popular news app in the Apple App Store in Scandinavia, Spain, and Germany is Twitter. The most recent figures revealed that Swedish consumers were the most inclined to use the Twitter app for news, with Twitter ranking as the top iPhone news app in Sweden by far, seeing almost double the number of downloads than the app of daily newspaper Aftonbladet Nyheter. Reddit is also frequently used as a news source among European audiences and is one of the leading iPhone news apps in Germany and Spain, racking up millions of daily active users and outpacing the apps of respective national news sources such as BILD News and Cadena SER radio.European news audiences will continue to access their news online as more and more options become available, but trust in news media is not what it could be, not only due to the prevalence of fake news but also as a result of biased or poorly researched content. European respondents to a global survey said that knowing the website or app on which they find news is unbiased and independent is the most important factor in helping them to trust online information. As such, digital news platforms must ensure that their content is fact-checked, trustworthy, and transparent in order to satisfy their readers and improve the quality of the online news landscape.
