'I Saw the News on Facebook': Brand Attribution when Accessing News from Distributed Environments

DOI: 10.60625/risj-207c-k891

The growth of social media and other aggregators over the last few years has changed the nature of online consumption.

Our question is: Do people remember the news brand when they visit a story via social media or search engines? In order to answer this question we used a YouGov panel to automatically track website usage by a representative sample of UK internet users and then serve a survey to see if they could remember the brand.

We find that less than half could remember the name of the news brand for a particular story when coming from search engines or social media. Users were more likely to remember the brand via social media and search engines when they read a story from their main source of news. Young people were also more likely to correctly attribute a news brand when coming from social media compared with older respondents.