The main barrier to watching news videos (for all respondents) was ‘I find reading quicker and more convenient’, at 41 percent, followed by ‘ads tend to put me off’ (35 percent), ‘videos take too long to load’ (20 percent), ‘videos don’t add to the text story’. (image: KobizMedia/ Korea Bizwire)
SEOUL, July 12 (Korea Bizwire) – We’re entering the era of virtual reality. Surrounded by hundreds of entertainment devices that stimulate multiple senses at once, reading, a single-sense experience, may seem mundane.
However, a recent study has shown otherwise, revealing that news readers prefer text over video for their online news consumption. The study was conducted by the Korea Press Foundation and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (University of Oxford).
The survey, which involved the participation of 53,330 individuals in 26 countries, revealed that 59 percent of the respondents read a text news article in a given week, compared to only 24 percent who watched an online news video.
Domestic trends in Korea closely mirrored global patterns, with 62 percent of respondents saying that they had read a text article, and only 26 percent accessing online news videos.
Those who replied ‘I usually read news articles’ accounted for 31 percent of all respondents, while 42 percent replied ‘although I usually read news articles, I also watch video news if it seems intriguing’. Another 13 percent said that they consume both text articles and video news in somewhat equal amounts, while only 7 percent said ‘I usually watch video news and only sometimes read articles’.
The main barrier to watching news videos (for all respondents) was ‘I find reading quicker and more convenient’, at 41 percent, followed by ‘ads tend to put me off’ (35 percent), ‘videos take too long to load’ (20 percent), ‘videos don’t add to the text story’.
Meanwhile, more than half of the respondents used smartphones to access news, with Korea near the front of the pack at 66 percent behind Sweden (69 percent), which ranked first, and followed by Switzerland (61 percent).
By Lina Jang (linajang@koreabizwire.com)
