Audience Engagement Digital Publishing
1 min read

Digital media adoption overtakes traditional media, for the first time

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Digital adoption accelerated during the pandemic

For the first time, digital media have overtaken traditional media types in adoption, with digital adoption accelerating during the pandemic, according to the latest report by MarketingCharts, US Media Audience Demographics, 7th Annual Edition. 

This 54-page study—compiled using proprietary data sourced from MRI-Simmons and Comscore—details the audience breakdown of several major online and offline media types, essentially posing the question: who’s listening to, reading, or watching what?

Even better news for digital publishers, the highest annual growth (11.8%) was recorded for digital newspapers/periodicals, from 49.4% to 61.2% in just one year.

A few takeaways from the above chart:

  • All digital media types have experienced some degree of uptick in weekly usage over the past year, while the opposite is true for legacy media types
  • Readership of digital newspapers and periodicals has registered the largest jump of all media, likely due to the pandemic
  • Streaming video is now the medium with the broadest adoption rate of all analyzed, overtaking traditional TV in a new milestone

When looking at audience reach by demographic, the 25-34 bracket tends to have among the highest rates of digital media use, but adoption is also high among other age brackets.

A declining number of American adults read newspapers during the typical week, falling further behind digital newspapers and periodicals.


Presenting a demographic breakdown of various major media types, the study compares media channels across variables and identifies trends in the composition of those audiences.

The full report is available from MarketingCharts:
US Media Audience Demographics, 7th Annual Edition