Why Advertisers Should Invest in Quality Journalism

The traditional news industry is suffering – from publishers experiencing sweeping layoffs, fewer resources, and declining Facebook referral traffic on news to advertisers continuing to decrease ad spend due to fear of brand safety issues. Despite this turmoil, consumers are still demonstrating a significant interest in news content for both entertainment and educational purposes. Connatix recently polled more than 1,000 U.S. consumers aged 18+ to better understand the type of content they want to see from publishers and we uncovered several surprising findings that point to a notable and steady interest in the news business. For advertisers, it would be detrimental to their business to deprioritize the news industry as they’ll not only miss out on a large potential audience, but also face an ethical responsibility to invest in news and uplift quality journalism to keep consumers informed. 

For brands looking to become more educated on consumer content preferences in order to make informed decisions about their ad strategies, take note of the following findings from our report.

The majority of consumers across age ranges prefer news content

Despite the decline in advertiser support for news, our report found that 62% of consumers still prefer news content, and beyond that, 55% of consumers prefer news from publishers, demonstrating that a large market remains for this type of content. Most viewers under age 55 prefer to watch entertainment videos from publishers, but as ages and income levels rise, this interest shifts to news, with 68% of respondents ages 55+ saying that they visit publishers’ websites directly to consume news content.

Higher education and higher income levels correlate with higher interest in news content

Consumers who have degrees from higher education as well as higher income levels correlate to a higher interest in news content from publishers - 63% of people with master's degree or higher are consuming news and 66% of people making $150,000 per year or more are the most avid news watchers.

Most people consume news on laptop or desktop computers

This may be surprising, but the majority of people consume news from publishers on laptop (65%) or desktop (60%) vs. mobile phones. This is likely due to several factors –  the first being that most people consume different types of content on their phones; or are reading and watching news during the workday; and finally, the majority of news viewers (ages 55+) are also the majority of people using desktop computers (49%). 

News is essential for the healthy functioning of democracy and society, however despite the findings above, news publishers are unfortunately often the first to experience spending cuts from advertisers due to ongoing brand safety concerns. While this is an increasing issue in the ad industry, it’s important that advertisers continue to find solutions to invest in news content, as this content is vital for consumers to stay informed without paywalls. 

Veena McCoole, Head of Comms and Marketing at NewsGuard noted that platforms like Connatix that leverage NewsGuard’s ratings can help advertisers to approach news as a category safely, diversify their ad spend to reach a broad audience, and invest in quality journalism in order to provide consumers with important news content. 

Connatix’ Deep Contextual, the most intuitive contextual solution for smarter video advertising, can help solve this issue by guiding brands to make informed decisions about their ad spend and specifically target topics and keywords to reach this valuable target audience vs. broadly blocking all news which jeopardizes publishers and advertisers alike. 

To find out more about news packages and the above consumer content preferences, download the full report here.