Most young men get their news online, says survey

More than two thirds of young men (72%) quizzed by researchers said they relied on online sources for their news consumption.

The Great Male Survey, developed and executed by IGN Entertainment site AskMen.com, shines a light on the media, technology and entertainment habits of men aged 18 to 34 in the UK.

Just 9% of men said they relied on print newspapers for the majority of their news, 12% relied on television, 5% on social media and 2% on other sources.

Almost a third of the men (28%) who took part in the study said they never read a newspaper, with a further 41% claming they read papers less often than they used to.

The study, which was designed in consultation with Ipsos, found that computers, rather than other technologies, were the devices that men could not live without.

More than two thirds (67%) of the 7,000 men quizzed for the survey said computers were their most important device, with 21% claiming smartphones took priority.

Tablet devices, such as the iPad, were identified by just 2% of men as the device they could not live without, and computers were the dominant devices (64%) used for non-work activities.

More men also said they would be in front of their mobiles (20%) than TV (13%) when not at work.

For 10% of the men surveyed, TV remained the integral technology. However, 21% of respondents said they never watched TV, with a further 35% agreeing that they watched less TV than they had previously.

Television series were predominantly watched online as downloads or streams, the survey said, with 43% of men watching their favourite series this way.

More than a quarter of respondents said they also used their computers to download or stream movies, with a further 5% watching via video-on-demand sites.

Drew Lubega, editor of AskMen, said: "Men in 2011 are kings of convergence. Many said they couldn’t live without their computer and this is backed up by other statistics, with a fifth of males saying they no longer watch TV in a conventional way, and are visiting the cinema less to download films online – either legally, or illegally.

"Technology is making it even easier for men to consume media on their terms, often through a single screen".

The AskMen.com survey follows publication of a report last week by KPMG that revealed media companies across Europe and the Middle East believed that to date, they have only in many cases paid "lip service" to the digital revolution, with more than half (57%) listing preparing for major business-model change as one of their top three priorities for the future.

KPMG’s Business Leaders Survey – taking in the views of 1,500 business leaders from businesses across 15 sectors in 22 countries – found that business-model change was the number-one priority for one-fifth (19%) of media companies.

Moreover, 81% of media businesses agreed that too many business models were rooted in the analogue past and would need to be rewritten.

David Elms, head of Media at KPMG, said: "Traditional media is in slow decline and those companies that hang onto their analogue roots will slowly decline with it.

"They need to accept that yields per consumer are less for digital than for analogue and redesign their operating models. "

The research also suggested that industry concepts such as paywalls could become permanent fixtures in the future.

Three-quarters of respondents agreed that there was a future in monetising content through paywalls, and just 3% disagreed. However, Elms said paywalls were likely to only be part of the answer.

He said: "I believe we will continue to see other revenue mechanisms such as advertising-based models, exist alongside.

"In addition, I anticipate that companies will introduce ‘freemium’ models, which allow users to access a certain amount of content before having to pay."

This article was first published on mediaweek.co.uk