Tinius Digest August
Tinius Digest
Tinius Digest report on changes, trends and developments within the media business at large. These are our key findings from last month.
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Insight August 2022
MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have looked into how Wikipedia influences the courts.
The researchers took over 150 articles on Irish Supreme Court decisions—published half as new Wikipedia articles—and then scanned court judgments for linguistic similarities and references.
Three main findings:
1
Significant influence
Getting a public Wikipedia article increased a case’s citations by more than 20 percent. The increase was statistically significant.
2
Affects lower courts
The increase was greater for citations by lower courts—the High Court—and mostly absent for citations by appellate courts—the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal.
3
High workload
The researchers suspect the findings show that Wikipedia is used more by judges or clerks who have a heavier workload, for whom the convenience of Wikipedia offers a more significant attraction.
Researchers from the University of Zurich and the University of Oxford have published a research paper on the role of news media knowledge in how people use social media for news. The study uses online survey data for five countries: Sweden, Germany, Spain, the United States and Great Britain.
Three main findings:
1
Low news media knowledge
Overall the news media knowledge is low in the five countries. No more than half of those surveyed were able to give more than two correct responses to fundamental news media knowledge questions.
2
More knowledge – more social media
People with higher news media knowledge are more likely to include social media in their news repertoire – but not as their primary or only news source.
3
More skeptical of sources
News media knowledge is positively associated with paying attention to the source and editorial cues—but negatively associated with paying attention to the number of likes, comments and shares. This association is particularly strong in Sweden.
Subscription platform Piano has published their Subscription Performance Benchmark Report 2022.
Four main findings:
1
Impulse purchase
Four out of ten conversions happen on the first engagement day on the website. Then the number of conversions over time declines until an increased conversion rate after ten active days (19%).
2
Inactive (but valuable) subscribers
For the average subscription website, 40 percent of subscribers have been inactive for at least 30 days. Inactive subscribers are not getting much value from their subscriptions but may contribute significant revenue to the website. It’s only when they become active again that the cancellation rates soar.
3
Lower conversions on mobile
Though mobile visitors make up 65 percent of digital audiences today, they convert at a much lower rate—19.7 percent compared to 42.4 percent for desktop users. Mobile users are likelier to abandon checkout at the first sign of friction.
4
Free registration = 45 times higher conversion
Registration can be an important step toward paid conversion for many websites. While the conversion rate for anonymous visitors is just 0.22 percent, conversion rises to 9.88 percent for known users. That’s a 45X difference.
Researchers at Texas Tech University have conducted a study focusing on problematic news consumption. These are people who are addicted to negative news.
Four main findings:
1
Alarming findings
The study found that 16.5 percent of the respondents had ‘severely problematic news consumption’. The researchers found this ‘particularly alarming.’
2
Mental and physical ill-being
People with higher levels of problematic news consumption experience significantly greater mental and physical ill-being than those with lower levels of problematic news consumption. The findings are significant even after controlling for demographics, personality traits, and general news use.
3
Increased media literacy
The study indicates a need for media literacy campaigns focused on raising awareness of the potential for news consumption to develop into problematic behavior and the need for developing intervention strategies.
4
It may be the other way around
The study does not establish a causal relationship between problematic news consumption and mental and physical ill-being. People with greater mental and physical ill-being may consume significantly more negative news than others. But the addiction aspect of the study is nevertheless established.
Google, the University of Cambridge, the University of Bristol and the University of Western Australia have studied the effect of psychological inoculation—the ability to ‘vaccinate’ people against manipulation.
Three main findings:
1
Highly effective
Showing the 30,000 participants a set of five short videos improve manipulation technique recognition, boosts confidence in spotting these techniques, increases people’s ability to discern trustworthy from untrustworthy content, and enhances the quality of their sharing decision.
2
Broad effect
The effects are robust across the political spectrum and various covariates.
3
Easy to scale
The researchers concluded that inoculation videos could be run as public-service ads ahead of potentially harmful content and efficiently scaled across millions of users. Inoculation videos can be applied in a wide range of issue domains, including reducing susceptibility to radicalizing content.
Researchers from The Norwegian Institute for Social Research and the University of Oslo have examined how social media affects news consumption gaps during election campaigns.
The study does not include the broader democratic implications of news consumption on social media.
Three main findings:
1
Reducing gaps in political media consumption
Social media provides political information to groups that use traditional media channels the least, thereby decreasing overall gaps in political media consumption.
2
Stable news gaps
The gaps in news consumption are either narrow or remain stable during the course of the election campaign.
3
Sociodemographic differences
Most of the sociodemographic differences in news usage are strongly related to political interest. Those with lower education levels consume less news than those with higher education levels, young people consume less news than the elderly, and the politically interested consume more news than the less interested.
American Press Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research have surveyed news consumption habits among young Americans aged 16 to 40.
Three main findings:
1
Following news – without much joy
Only 32 percent of Americans ages 16 to 40 say they enjoy following the news. That’s a marked decrease the last seven years when 53 percent said the same. Fewer young people now say they enjoy talking with family and friends about the news.
2
Social media is an essential source
An estimated 71 percent of the group gets news daily from social media. Facebook (40%), YouTube (37%), Instagram (34%) and TikTok (29%) are the most important platforms for news consumption. Yet 45 percent also said they get news each day from traditional sources.
3
Misinformation widespread
9 in 10 young people say misinformation about issues and events is a problem, including about 6 in 10 say it’s a major problem. Most say they’ve been exposed to misinformation themselves.