Almost half of Taiwanese are getting their news from YouTube, as traditional media outlets scramble for strategies to counter social media's rising influence across the globe, the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report found.
Forty-six percent of Taiwanese respondents said that they used YouTube for news in a survey conducted from mid-January to the end of February, up from 38 percent in 2021, according to the report, which was released on June 17.
Other than Facebook, social media platforms, such as Line, Instagram, Tiktok and Threads, showed growth of 1 to 6 percentage points from the previous year, the report said.
Photo: AFP
Line ranked second among the social media platforms relied on by Taiwanese for news at 42 percent, followed by Facebook, which dropped 2 percentage points to 37 percent, the report said.
Instagram ranked fourth at 14 percent, followed by Tiktok at 10 percent and newcomer Threads at 8 percent.
Traditional media outlets in Taiwan continued to see their popularity as a source for news decline, with TV news at 56 percent this year compared with 77 percent in 2017 and print media falling from 41 percent in 2017 to 14 percent, the report said.
Shrinking advertising income — the result of diminishing popularity — and the changing media environment mean an increasing number of traditional outlets are uploading their video news to YouTube, the report said in its section on Taiwan, which was authored by National Taiwan University professor Lin Lihyun (林麗雲).
Traditional outlets are also adapting long-form stories into short videos for social media, Lin wrote.
Meanwhile, Taiwanese users' trust in news slid 3 percentage points to 30 percent, ranking Taiwan 39th in the 48 markets surveyed in the report.
Taiwan is no different from other countries in terms of media environment and trends, the report found.
Lead author Nic Newman wrote in the executive summary that two emerging themes demand attention: the rise of an alternative media ecosystem including the likes of YouTubers, Tiktokers and podcasters, and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots as a source of news.
AI chatbots are a source of news for 6 percent of Taiwan's news market, the report found.
An accelerating shift toward consuming news on social media and video platforms is further diminishing the influence of "institutional journalism," Newman wrote, adding that changing platform strategies mean that video continues to grow in importance as a source of news.
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