The Media Briefing has an interesting article looking at some recently-released statistics about Internet use in the UK. Only 77% of British households have Internet access, and half of those who don’t have it don’t feel they need it. And only a little more than half of those who do have it say they regularly read news on it.

To put this in context, 57 percent of internet users and 91 percent of 16-to-24-year-olds used social networking sites in the same period. The people who are soon going to be your ad manager’s target audience already spend more time talking to friends and sharing photographs then perhaps they ever will reading newspapers or magazines online.

The article points out that the number of people who read news online is slowly creeping up, but there will still be many people who never make the transition to online reading. It suggests papers should not overestimate “how digital” their audience is.

1 COMMENT

  1. Yeah, but… How many of those who don’t read news online don’t read it offline either? Some people just don’t read. A magazine doesn’t care how much of the total population is reading news online, it cares about how much of it’s readership is doing so. You can’t tell from this data, but I think it would have to be a higher percentage than this report, simply to account for those people who don’t read news in any form.

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