Local News, Videos, and News Videos
Hi everyone! If you are new to the Firefox Context Graph blog, we are studying how people engage with news online with the goals of helping you discover higher-quality news, assess, and trust information on the web.
I’ve got three topics for this blog post today:
- Some relevant articles about on how (online) local news affects our (physical) local community.
- Findings from our recent survey about videos on the web.
- Additional research questions about news.
Local News and Local Communities
First of all, Pew Research reported last month that online news consumption is closing in on television news consumption in the U.S. As the web increasingly becomes a significant source of news — quite possibly the primary source in the near future — what takes place online can increasingly affect the physical world including our own local communities.
A couple weeks ago, New York Times documented how fake news turned the small town of Twin Falls, Idaho upside down, but the issues can go deeper than just the spread of misinformation.
How about civic participation? What about our ability to come together and build a strong community through voting, volunteering, connecting, and engaging with those around us?
Research conducted last year by Pew Research in association with the Knights Foundation finds that civic engagement is strongly tied to local news habits. As recently as 2011, Americans rely on their local newspapers for 11 types of local news topics with television broadcast coming in second. However, as newspaper readership continues to decline and with online news gaining on television broadcast, what is the future of local news?
The answer — and the importance of a healthy internet and a strong local community for every one of us — may well depend on the webpages rendered in our browser.
News Engagement via Online Videos
Earlier this summer, we find that the younger generations are the least interested in keeping up with the news. The most disinterested study participants also show the lowest levels of engagement with news — at least when measured via traditional means of news sharing such as emailing a news article, commenting on, or participating in online discussions.
Given the rise of online videos, video-centric social networking sites and apps, we decided to investigate video usage on the web and how people obtain news via online videos.
Study Design and Analysis Goals
In the rest of blog post, I’ll briefly describe how our findings compare to earlier ones reported by Pew Research surveys from 2007 to 2013. Replicating known studies allows us to benchmark our responses — obtained through Firefox users who volunteer and donate their time to participate in Heartbeat surveys (thank you!) — to existing results.
While we cannot claim that these self reports are truly representative of the U.S. population, internet users, or even Firefox users at large, they do shed light on potential difficulties, needs, or wants for accessing high-quality news. We will incorporate these findings alongside other observations such as usage data, user behaviors, or expressed intents, when designing future products or tools.
I’ll also briefly discuss some outstanding research questions that we have. Here at Mozilla, we are in a unique position — with your help, consent, and participation — to study online browsing behaviors that few other non-profit organizations can do at scale.
Assuming we can reliably detect meaningful signals from our data, we would like to utilize the information you provide not just for product design, but also help contribute to the body of academic research on the world wide web and beyond.
Video Usage on the Web
We looked into videos because it’s a significant area of growth for content distribution (and marketing). However, online videos can mean a great number of things to vastly different user populations — from content on the more traditional video-sharing sites such as YouTube, to movies that are now being licensed and distributed on the web, from chatting with your grandparents on Skype, to the under-60-second video stories on Instagram that disappear after 24 hours.
User Age (and Snapchat)
For the record, I signed up for Snapchat as I was designing this study to personally experience Snapchat News.
To my surprise, I could learn about North Korea and its leader Kim Jong-un in a short news video produced by the Washington Post (with links to the several relevant articles; just swipe up!) alongside other daily news videos from numerous major publishers — the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Wired, Popular Mechanics, the Food Network, ESPN, Vogue, GQ — and all the celebrity gossips that I ever wanted to know — from other magazines, tabloids, and my own friends.
Speaking of my friends, the teens and 20-year-olds among them all appeared to be on Snapchat, supporting personal anecdotes that the video platform is becoming a significant source of information for the younger generation. I guess the kids really do live in a different world now? Or, is it us, the 30-year-olds who are out of touch with technology? :O
On a more serious and scientific note, I compiled various findings by Pew Research, and found that age is more frequently identified as a significant predictor of who consumes local news — and what type of news — than all other demographic variables. (Please let me know if you would like to learn more. I am happy to expand on it in a future blog post.)
Age Distribution of Study Participants
Because age has a significant effect on how internet users consume content, we asked for age information from all participants.
Similar to our previous study, we observe more Firefox users (specifically, those who respond to Heartbeat surveys) who are between 20 to 36 years old than other age groups. All data presented in the rest of this blog post is weighted to match the estimated number of U.S. internet users by age.
What is an Online Video?
We asked our study participants what online videos mean to them. Here is a breakdown of our data and a comparison to the Pew Research 2013 study. Our participants consume slightly more content on video-sharing sites and social media, watch less movies or TVs online, and engage in fewer video chats. Our participants download more videos, but upload videos at roughly the same rate as the Pew report.
Types of Videos
We then asked our study participants what types of videos they watch on the web, and compared the results to trends reported in 2007, 2009, and 2013.
For eight types of videos, our numbers fit within a linear extrapolation of the earlier Pew Research findings — giving us a small sense of confidence that we might be able to capture meaningful user behaviors using the Heartbeat platform in Firefox.
There is only one prior data point for how-to videos, and therefore a linear extrapolation cannot be computed. The two exceptions are animations and adult videos. Animations exhibited super-linear growth, and our numbers for adult videos are about three times higher.
Pew Research, however, have themselves openly questioned the accuracy of their own telephone-based surveys for adult content, which they believe people are reluctant to report truthfully and is a significant underestimate.
The discrepancy creates an interesting question: Could Heartbeat users be more open to self-reporting their behaviors online than over the telephone? In other words, as a survey mechanism, could we collect certain information— or measure certain data more accurately — in ways that Pew Research cannot?
News Videos and Young Users
We asked our study participants, how frequently they watch videos about news. As a control, we asked a separate group of users about comedy videos. Our other questions about political vs. sports videos yielded similar patterns, so I will present the data about the former.
News Videos
The following chart shows news video consumption by age. We observe that those who frequently watch news videos (multiple times a week or more) peak at around 35 to 49. We observe a small group of younger users between 25 and 39, who have never watched news videos. We observe yet another group of even younger users, under 24, who have at least tried watching news videos but no longer do so regularly (less than once a month).
Comedy Videos
As a point of comparison, the following chart shows comedy video consumption by age. The greatest usage (multiple times a day) are among users under 24 years old. Overall, comedy video usage decreases as a function of age.
How are (the younger) users getting their news?
Earlier this summer, we found that the younger generations show the least interest in keeping up with the news. By looking into online videos, we had hoped to uncover other sources of news consumption. In this survey, however, we find that, despite consuming more video content and showing a stronger preference for information delivered via video format, younger users — roughly under 35 or those in Generation Y and some in Generation X — are not watching news videos.
These results open up numerous questions but mainly: How are the younger users getting their news?
Assuming that staying informed and keeping up with current events is a cornerstone of civic participation, the answer may affect not just our experience on the web — but increasingly impact our real-world local communities too.
How are you getting your news?
A silver-lining in all these data, though, is that Firefox does have a younger user base — who have so far exhibited lower levels of news engagement and could potentially benefit the most from having access to high-quality information.
We are currently exploring various tools and product ideas, but we would love to hear from you, too.
How are you getting your news? Whom do you trust on the internet? At a time when so much information is funneled through Facebook, do you still encounter viewpoints that differ from yours? Where do you see them? How do you have a constructive online discussion? Are there specific websites, apps, organizations, or publishers that you think are doing a great job bridging different perspectives — and bringing people together?
