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Country and market data 2021

Country and market data

Methodological note

In this section we publish a market-based view of the findings, which includes an overview of the most important data points in terms of news.

These include an overview of consumption in each market, including details of the most popular news brands – traditional and online. The pages also contain statistics about the use of devices such as smartphones and tablets and the role of different social networks for news. Information is drawn from the 2021 Digital News Report survey using the methodology outlined, with the exception of population and internet levels which are drawn from the latest version of Internet World Statistics.

Data from India, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa are representative of younger English-speakers and not the national population, because it is not possible to reach other groups in a representative way using online polling. The survey was fielded in English in these markets (respondents had the option of selecting Hindi in India and Swahili in Kenya, but the majority selected English), and restricted to ages 18-50 in Kenya and Nigeria.

In some other markets, where internet penetration is lower, our data often represent younger and more affluent groups – even if it meets other nationally representative quotas. For all these reasons, one should be cautious in comparing some data points across markets where we know these limitations apply. In a few markets we do not show certain data points (such as paying for news) because we feel these could lead to misunderstandings or misleading comparisons. We have also signalled specific details about samples in a short note on the relevant page and also include the internet penetration rate on each.

In the Netherlands we conducted a repoll of brand reach numbers in late March 2021 due to a scripting error in the original poll. All other numbers are taken from the January/February poll. Due to a scripting error there are no 'Sources of News' data for 2014 in any market.

We have ordered the countries and markets by geography (Europe, Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Africa) and within each region countries are then ordered alphabetically – with the exception of UK at the start of the Europe section and the United States at the start of the Americas.

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