Sharethrough, a native advertising specialist, this week released the results of a UK survey revealing that premium publishers rank higher than social platforms in terms of trust, transparency and engagement.
The survey showed that readers’ trust in premium publishers is higher than news content on social media, with 79% trusting the BBC, 61% trusting The Times and The Guardian, while only 36% said they trusted news on Facebook and Twitter.
Meanwhile, over three quarters (79%) of the respondents think it’s very important to know the origins of news content and have more confidence in how premium publishers source their news than social platforms.
70% said that they knew where news was sourced by the BBC, against only 43% for Facebook.
The research also revealed that consumers engage more with stories on premium publisher sites, with 53% more likely to read an article on The Guardian than on Facebook, where only 18% of respondents admit to spending more than 30 minutes reading news on the platform.
“It is heartening to see that the UK public still ranks premium publishers ahead of social platforms in terms of trust and confidence in their source of information,” said Ally Stuart, managing director EMEA at Sharethrough.
“As brand safety concerns continue to be an issue in advertising, editorial publishers can differentiate by offering a premium environment, with a sense of audience trust and engagement that social platforms can never match.”
Sharethrough also conducted a similar survey in the US, which showed that consumers are slightly less sceptical about the content they read than they are in the UK.
The survey was conducted among a Qualtrics sample of 500 UK residents aged 18-50 weighted evenly by gender and age.
