Native digital media consolidates itself as news leader in Argentina

The report is based on an online survey conducted by YouGov in January and February of this year among a representative sample of 2,007 people living in Argentina. According to the results of this study, 46% of those questioned declared having visited Infobae at least once the week preceding the study. In second place is the cable TN signal with 37%, and in third place the Telefe television channel with 34%.

These three media – Infobae, TN and Telefe – formed, in this order, the leader in information consumption for the past three years. What’s new for 2021 is widen the gap which separates Infobae from TN and Telefe. While in 2020 it was 1 and 5 percentage points respectively, in 2021 it was extended to 9 and 12 percentage points respectively. This expansion stems from a scenario of increasing Infobae audiences and decreasing those of TN and Telefe.

Slight rise in confidence in the news

The report also identified four indicators of confidence in the news: current events in general; those that respondents consume in the media; those who consume through search engines; and those found in networks. These first two indicators show a slight 3 percentage point rebound in each case compared to 2020. It is possible that this trend is linked to the pandemic: in a context of informational uncertainty the public seems to trust the information provided by the media more.

However, the general trend since the Report started measuring trust in news in 2018 has been declining. And in 2021 Argentina ranks 33rd out of 46 countries included in the study in terms of confidence in the news.

Instagram’s growth as a news source continues

The networks have established themselves as a central access route for the information public living in Argentina. In 2021, two-thirds of those interviewed for this Report said they had been informed through one or more platforms.

But a comparative analysis of the use of the six major social networks since 2018 reveals less access to news on the networks with one clear exception: Instagram, which for the first time ranks third for news consumption, supplanting YouTube.

The downward trend is relatively less in the case of Facebook (from 60% in 2018 to 56% in 2021, WhatsApp (from 37% to 36%) and YouTube (27% to 24%). Twitter, which decreasing from 18% to 12% from 2018 to 2021 lost a third of its information audience.

However, where more movement is recorded is in the increase of respondents who say they consume news on Instagram: from 13% in 2018 to 25% in 2021. In three years, this platform has almost duplicate the number of users who say they consume news there.

This increase is consistent with the growing popularity of news consumption on other platforms with high recreational and audiovisual content such as Snapchat and TikTok, especially among younger sectors of the population who use social networks.

A new map of information consumption

At the dawn of the third decade of the 21st century few vestiges of the media map that marked the second half of the 20th century. In this new setting the leading media is digital native, audiences have little confidence in the information they consume and booming social networks are those where image predominates.

That twenty years is nothing? It seems that in the case of digital information, it is exactly the opposite.