Taiwan
While Taiwan’s commercial media have restructured to prioritise short-form video and social content in response to platform dominance, this digital shift has yet to reverse stagnant financial returns. Conversely, public and niche media are achieving sustainability by pivoting away from broad reach towards deep audience engagement, community building, and knowledge monetisation.
Over the past decade, Taiwan’s media practitioners have struggled to keep pace with rapid technological shifts and, more recently, AI-driven SEO. In the same period, advertising revenue for the five major traditional media categories nearly halved (-47%) according to the Taipei Media Services Agency Association.1 While digital advertising skyrocketed by over 200%, the vast majority of these gains were captured by US-based platforms. Traditional media's digital earnings – including ads and YouTube profit-sharing – remain insufficient to offset the massive losses in traditional advertising markets.
To mitigate losses, several news organisations have undergone significant restructuring. 42% of Taiwanese consumers now utilise social media for news, and news outlets have expanded digital teams to prioritise short-form text and video that’s tailored to these platforms. With Taiwan generating 21% of global Threads traffic,2 media are shifting towards ‘personified engagement’, adopting a more human and relatable voice to interact with readers. News organisations have simultaneously cut departments and personnel dedicated to in-depth, investigative reporting.
TVBS, a privately owned news network, pivoted to digital production and ranks at the top of this study for both traditional and digital news usage (41% and 31%, respectively). The network however continued to register limited digital revenue growth. This widening gap has led to a severe decline in profitability, with TVBS reportedly facing its first-ever loss this year. Consequently, the network has initiated austerity measures and let go of approximately 45 employees from traditional news roles, such as photojournalists and regional correspondents.
Major news media associations in Taiwan have been advocating for ’news funding legislation’ since 2021, including proposing mechanisms such as mandatory bargaining between digital platforms and news media, alongside a platform tax to establish a ‘news development fund’. In June 2025, a joint petition calling for legislative action was launched by Taiwanese communication scholars and industry practitioners under the ’Stop Platform Exploitation, Save Journalism’ Action Group.
In 2025, Taiwan’s public media group the Taiwan Broadcasting System (TBS), which includes both the Public Television Service (PTS) and the Chinese Television System (CTS), saw one-quarter of its budget frozen by the opposition for six months in the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s parliament. In response, TBS sought to demonstrate the value of public media to secure public support.
During the Mataian Creek dam failure in September 2025, the TBS team trekked directly to the collapse site to produce a 26-part series on resettlement and risk assessment. The series garnered over 2m views, representing nearly 10% of the total population. As a result of building and scaling its Southeast Asian language services, TBS claim the international reach of their services can be twice the size of its domestic audience during major events.
TBS also initiated the ‘Public Media AI Chatbot Collaborative Project’ to establish an AI ecosystem that connects national media outlets – including CNA, RTI, and TITV – to integrate news archives with authorised data from non-profit groups. The project features a ‘traceable’ AI chatbot that links responses back to original news sources.
Threads has gained significant traction in Taiwan, with 30% general usage and 14% specifically for news. During Typhoon Danas in July 2025, Threads was used as a decentralised, real-time disaster map, enabling users to share hyper-local updates on water levels and road conditions faster than institutional channels.
Niche outlets CommonWealth Magazine and Business Weekly have adopted knowledge monetisation strategies to diversify their revenue. As a non-profit organisation, The Reporter focuses on narrative journalism – such as the ‘Children of the Ruins’ series – to analyse systemic policy issues and to seek public donations on the back of its investigative reporting.
Lihyun Lin
National Taiwan University
In the online survey we ask respondents which news brands they have used to access news in the last week. These figures are based on respondents’ recall of the news sources they have used, and should be understood as survey-based measures of weekly brand reach for news.
They are not the same as web analytics, audience ratings, or other audience measurement systems (such as BARB for television in the UK). Those approaches use different methods and may measure different things. Our figures are based on what respondents tell us in an online survey about which brands they have used for news in the past week.
It is also important to note that we ask specifically about use for news. Some multi-genre broadcasters, newspapers, or other providers offer content beyond news, and the figures in our report should not be interpreted as measuring the overall audience reach for these media organisations. They refer only to respondents who say they used that brand to access news.
How do you ask about offline and online news reach?
We ask about offline and online reach separately. First, we ask respondents which brands they have used to access news offline in the last week, via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. Then we ask which brands they have used to access news online in the last week, via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of internet access.
The questions as asked in the survey are:
Which of the following brands have you used to access news offline in the last week (via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media)? Please select all that apply.
Which of the following brands have you used to access news online in the last week (via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of Internet access)? Please select all that apply.
Respondents can select more than one brand in each question. For that reason, the figures do not add up to 100%. They show the proportion of respondents who say they used each brand for news in the last week.
How do you present the weekly news reach data in the report?
On each country or market page, we present the most widely used brands in two charts: one for offline news reach and one for online news reach. The offline chart covers use via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. The online chart covers use via websites, apps, social media, and other internet-based forms of access.
The figures shown are weekly news reach: the percentage of respondents who say they used that brand for news at least once in the last week.
These figures are useful for comparing the relative news reach of different brands within each market, and for understanding how news use is distributed across offline and online sources. However, they should not be treated as market shares or measures of total time spent with a brand.
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
The brand selection is a strategic sample and not a comprehensive list of all news providers in each market. We consult with country or market experts, review prior years’ Digital News Report data, and draw on other data sources to identify the most widely used brands for news across traditional and online channels.
In some cases, where a news provider operates a number of related news brands, we aggregate these under a single heading. For example, in the UK, reach for the BBC may include use of several BBC news services across different platforms. This is done to give a clearer sense of the overall reach of major news providers, but it means that figures may not always refer to a single programme, website, app, newspaper, or channel.
Because of survey length limitations, we can only ask about a limited number of brands in each market. The charts should not be treated as exhaustive lists of every brand used for news in that market. Due to space limitations, reach charts show up to 16 of the most used brands, though we ask about more in each survey.
How should the offline and online figures be interpreted?
A respondent may use the same brand both offline and online, and may also use several different brands in the same week. For this reason, the offline and online figures should not be added together to calculate a total audience. They are best read as separate indicators of how far particular brands reach people through different forms of access.
As with other survey-based findings, small differences should be interpreted with caution. We are careful not to claim that one brand reaches more people than another, or that a brand’s reach has changed, unless the differences are large enough to be meaningful. Any year on year change of 2 percentage points or lower is not considered statistically significant.
Changing media
Print media have become significantly less influential over time, while television and digital news have also experienced slight declines. Social media as a news source remains stable in 2026.
Pay for online news
10%
(-4)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
19%
(-2)
Trust in news overall
25%
(-5)
Global average: 37%
Trust in news in Taiwan remains low following a further 5pp decline this year, as more partisan outlets have trust scores at the lower end of the spectrum.
We ask each respondent to rate a number of popular brands (usually 15 in each country) according to how trustworthy they think each brand’s news output is. We do this on a 0-10 scale, where a score of 0 means that the respondent does not see the brand as trustworthy at all and 10 means that they see the brand as completely trustworthy – with 5 meaning ‘neither trustworthy or untrustworthy’. There is an option for those who have not heard of any particular brand to ensure that scores are based only on responses from people who are familiar with each brand.
When we come to report these scores, we add up the proportion of respondents that give a score between 6-10 and mark this as ‘trust’. We also add up the proportion that give a brand a score between 0-4 and mark this as ‘don’t trust’.
The question as asked in the survey is…
How trustworthy would you say news from the following brands is? Please use the scale below, where 0 is ‘not at all trustworthy’ and 10 is ‘completely trustworthy’.
As we make explicit throughout the report, including next to tables presenting brand-level trust findings, whether respondents consider a brand trustworthy or not is their subjective judgement. The percentage figures shown are aggregates of people’s personal opinions, they are not an objective assessment of underlying trustworthiness. We leave it to each respondent to form an opinion on whether they trust someone or something, and we field the question because we consider the resulting data to be important.
How do you present the trust data in the report?
We present the data in an alphabetised table. In the past, we presented this data as a stacked bar chart, but this led some to treat the chart as a list of the most and least trusted news brands in a given market, despite our explicit explanation this was not what the tables showed.
We present the data in a way that avoids giving small differences the appearance of great importance. In cases where there is around two percentage points difference or less between the brands, we cannot say for sure that one brand is more trusted than another. We are careful not to try to claim that one brand is more trusted than another or that trust scores have changed unless those changes are statistically significant.
Due to survey length limitations, it is important to note that we only ask about 15 of the most widely used brands. It is very likely that there are brands with lower (and higher) trust scores that we do not ask about. For that reason, we cannot say that any brand is the least (or most) trusted overall. Next to each chart we are careful to say: “Only the below brands were included in the survey. It should not be treated as a list of the most or least trusted brands as it is not exhaustive.”
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
We consult with country or market experts, draw on prior years’ Digital News Report data and other data sources to determine the most widely used brands (across traditional and online channels) when it comes to news. We also try to include ‘local newspapers’ or ‘local television’ as catch-all titles as we recognise their impact is considerable in most markets.
How representative is this 48-market survey?
The Digital News Report survey is based on an online poll but the methodology selects participants to be as representative of national populations as possible. Samples are assembled using representative quotas for age, gender, and region in every market and data is weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data. The full methodology can be found here.
How do you try to contextualise the findings to ensure that trust scores are not taken out of context or misinterpreted?
Trust is one of a number of measures we track, including consumption of different sources, device usage, social media use, and much more. We aim to maintain consistency in our measurements year-on-year so that ratings of trust, levels of news consumption, and more, can be contextualised.
Country data is accompanied by an 800-word commentary from a media expert that aims to set the data in a wider context. We write a short commentary on the trust scores where appropriate, noting any statistically relevant changes.
RSF World Press Freedom Index
28/180
Score 75.44
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
