Although in many countries audiences place the highest trust on online news from familiar providers, they are using an increasingly varied set of ways to find that content. Google, Facebook, and Apple have become – to a greater or lesser extent – intermediaries for a large proportion of news journeys online. As a result, they have been able to take a significant share of the available advertising revenue around news, making the funding of trusted content arguably more uncertain. Our data show brand, search, and social media the most important discovery mechanisms, with search particularly important in European countries like France and Germany.

But perhaps the biggest trend in this data is the growing importance of social discovery. For the under 35s – looking at the aggregated data across all of our countries – this is now the most important way in which people find news stories.

For older groups, other ways of navigating to news, such as search, remain more important than social media.

Within this average, though, we see significant differences in behaviour by country. In the UK strong brands remain the main way of finding news for all age groups, but in the United States search and social media are more important. In all countries, younger groups are far more likely to use social media for news discovery.

Germany relies on a mixture of search and brand, with 18–44s twice as likely to use social media as the over 55s. The Brazilians use more gateways in total – reflecting their higher interest in news – but uniquely all age groups say social media is their most important way of finding news online.

Smartphones and tablets strengthen brands

Our data also suggest that those who use smartphones and tablets are more likely to go straight to a news brand. To some extent this is a function of their greater interest in news. But the data also indicate that certain mechanisms – like social newsreading apps and ‘push’ news alerts – are disproportionately used on these devices to discover news content.

Apps or mobile websites

The growth of news apps on tablets and smartphones has raised questions about the new gatekeeping role of Apple and Google in particular. Our UK data suggest that news apps are more important for smartphones than for tablets. This may be because apps make better use of the smaller screen size available on a smartphone, although it will be interesting to see how this changes with the roll out of more ‘web apps’ and responsively designed websites.¹ Apple users in the UK are significantly more likely to download a news app from a store (52% vs 31% for non iPhone users).

We also asked our UK smartphone and tablet users whether they accessed news via branded link or an aggregator like a search engine or social network. On both devices, respondents said the desktop icon was the most important route to news, suggesting that strong news brands may be benefiting from the historic shift to mobile.

To explore this further, we asked people specifically which brands they used on which device across a range of countries. There are three broad conclusions:

• Brands that grew up with the web browser, helped in many cases by default browser settings – Yahoo and MSN – are losing out on tablet and smartphone in the UK and United States at least.
• Brands that have built a reputation for breaking news – Sky News, CNN, and Der Spiegel – have gained market share on mobile, but not necessarily on the tablet.
• Other strong brands – New York Times, Fox News, Daily Mail, the Guardian – tend to pick a similar market share across platforms. People tend to use the brands they are comfortable with elsewhere rather than change preference based on platform.

Brand winners and losers: Impact of platform on market share

One other explanation for some of these differences is that the aggregator brands in the US and UK (Yahoo, MSN, etc.) appeal more to lower income households that have not acquired these new devices. It will be interesting to see if these differences in market share even out as tablet and smartphone use becomes more mainstream.