Analysing and understanding news consumption patterns by tracking online user behaviour with a multimodal research design

Online News User Journeys: The Role of Social Media, News Websites, and Topics

“…Interestingly, online news consumers in countries, such as Finland, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands, were far more likely to access news by going directly to a news website or app, and to a lesser extent through search engines and social media. This resonates with results by Kleppe and Otte (2017), who explored online behavior in the Netherlands, and found that 59% of the news items that were read on news websites were accessed via a news website's home page, indicating that this is still the main driver of traffic to news items. Particularly, traffic to mainstream news websites from, for example, search engines accounts for a very small fraction of their total traffic.…”

“…The results indicate that news websites (compared to search engines or social media) most often serve as an entry-point to a Web session. In line with previous studies (Kleppe and Otte 2017;Newman et al 2017), the homepage of a news website can be considered as the main driver of traffic to such outlets. Although social media are not often used as an entry-point to a news item, our results do give an indication on the role of social media in the online news consumption process.…”

“…Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc (2018) have indicated, for example, to what extent user data can assess the performance of editorial choices. Given the complexity of online news consumption, it is important to understand the differences in news consumption processes contributed by each of the different (news) websites (Kleppe and Otte 2017). Our findings, for example, indicate that particularly other news outlets (mostly regional news outlets) benefit from Facebook referrals compared to mainstream outlets (e.g.…”

“…Future research that aims to analyze actual news consumption should, therefore, incorporate other websites throughout a Web session to build upon the concept of incidental news exposure (Tewksbury, Weaver, and Maddex 2001). It would also be worthwhile to gain insight into particular needs and preferences regarding news content, for example by conducting in-depth interviews (see Kleppe and Otte 2017).…”

“…People actively combine these different websites into complex patterns of media use. More importantly, patterns of news consumption also vary depending on the topic people are informed about (Kleppe and Otte 2017;Nielsen and Schrøder 2014). Scholars are concerned that people may predominantly consume entertainment news while neglecting political information online (see e.g.…”