A new report by Kantar and Google reveals that more than half of internet users in India consume news online, with close to 48% of them considering trust to be the key factor in driving news consumption. The report, which conducted over 4,600 in-person interviews and 64 qualitative discussions across 16 cities, found that interest in news consumption is higher in rural India (63%) compared to urban centers (37%).
The report also estimated that there are 729 million internet users in India, with 52% or 379 million accessing news online through various news apps, websites, social media, message forwards, and YouTube. The preferred format of news consumption for online news consumers is video, followed by text and audio.
YouTube tops the chart as a mode to access online news with 93% interest, followed by social media at 88%, chat apps at 82%, search engines with 61%, publisher news apps or websites at 45%, audio news at 39%, and OTT or connected TV at 21%.
The report also reveals that 80% of online news consumers have come across news that looks suspicious and is difficult to tag as real or misinformation. People use their way to detect misinformation. 43% consider it misinformation if they have received the news via WhatsApp or word of mouth and have not found it on any news website, and 40% consider a piece of news about a big incident not heard from anyone else around as misinformation. For 38%, repetition or resurfacing of old news as a current happening is misinformation, and for 37%, sensationalized news is misinformation.
In the core news segment, entertainment leads the chart with 76% of 379 million online news consumers accessing it. It is followed by crime and security news of the city and locality with 72% interest, and 71% have an interest in updates of events pertaining to national, state, and city headlines. In the non-core news segment, health and fitness top the chart with 71% interest, followed by technology with 61% interest and fashion with 56%.
People reading news items in Hindi, Kannada, and Tamil prefer spiritual and astrology in the non-core segment, while in the case of Bengali and Malayalam, news readers’ preference is for travel-related news, and Marathi news readers prefer arts and culture. Tamil online news consumers have access to 6.19 platforms on average, Gujarati 5.73, Kannada 5.68, and Hindi 5.21 platforms.
