Advertising folk, Britain’s young news readers are not all like you
Opinion
Our research has found that young news readers are not interested in the same news stories as we in adland are. Advertisers need to remember this if they want to grab their attention.
Young people: tiny attention spans, social media obsessed, couldn’t give a hoot about news. Right?
Not even close: nine in 10 read news, while seven in 10 read UK news brands.
What’s more, they read more than just celebrity news or articles about the latest TikTok trend. Young people are interested in a diverse range of subjects, whether that’s sport, politics, entertainment or stories about real people like them.
Indeed, even to talk about “young people” this way in the first place is to mistakenly treat them like a monolith. Newsworks’ extensive Youth research, which we released last autumn to confront industry myths around youth news consumption, makes it clear that when it comes to young people’s news habits, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach.
Young people don’t read news? Research from Newsworks suggests otherwise
5 archetypal readers
When we pored through a month’s worth of internet usage of 1,000 young Brits, we found five key archetypal readers. They were bound not by any common demographic characteristics, but by a mutual interest in particular subjects and ways in which the news fed their curiosity and shaped their views on their lives and the world.
These groups are reflective of the myriad ways young people consume news in the 2020s. “Meme me!” readers love great storytelling around both pop culture and more serious news, while “personal puzzlers” are more introspective, looking for their news to be personally relatable and intellectually challenging.
“Who scored?” readers bring their adrenaline-pumped focus on their beloved football news to their wider reading habits, while those in the “have you got news for me?” camp prefer to dig into the weeds to feed their insatiable news fix.
Finally, we can’t forget about “catch me if you can”: those youngest and lightest readers who still use news brands as trusted sources of information for what matters in their world.
Adland vs young people
Once we got the lay of the land among our young readers, we decided to have a little bit of fun and see how those in the industry would be classified with our very own personality quiz. We took real headlines that each type gravitated towards in our study and asked visitors to our research to choose those that appealed to them.
Of course, we had to take any conclusions with a pinch of salt. While our study rigorously combed through the internet usage of a nationally representative group of young Brits, our industry group of quiz respondents was smaller and self-selecting.
However, the trend that our pool of responses hints at is still worth reflecting on.
Of the five types of readers, the most common among those who took our quiz was “personal puzzlers” — news consumers who look for patterns in the disparate strands of society to get a better understanding of the world.
However, this cohort only ranked third in our research, with just 19% of young Brits falling into that camp.
Meanwhile, “meme me!”, those fast-paced, story-loving culture vultures, came out as the biggest cohort in our research but ranks bottom of our industry quiz-takers.
It’s fantastic that “personal puzzlers” is such a common archetype for our industry quiz-takers. It’s not surprising among media types — after all, it’s their job to analyse very different groups of people all over the country to ensure content is relevant and valued by their target audiences.
The fact that many respondents identified this way is testament to our industry’s curiosity about what truly makes their audiences tick.
Media bubble
The darker side of the coin, however, is that this is yet another reminder that we in media planning exist in a bubble.
In our interest to understand how others behave, we must always keep our own personal biases in check. In fact, 80% of the next generation’s news readers are not as interested, shocked or necessarily amused by the same news stories that we in adland clearly are.
Quizzes like ours are just a bit of fun, but hopefully they give us a little pinch too. It is up to advertisers to grab the attention of millions of young readers next to trusted and engaging content, wherever they access it and around whatever stories float their boat.
With their first-party data, news brands will always be on hand to ensure that the right ad meets the right audience in a trusted environment. As young people consume diverse content in a digital media ecosystem more blighted by misinformation than ever, that’s never been more important.
Heather Dansie is research and insight director at Newsworks