US adults now find news on video apps more than on websites

The test

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published its Digital News Report 2025 on 17 June 2025, its fourteenth annual edition, covering 48 markets across six continents. Among its findings, the executive summary states that in the United States, the share of respondents accessing news via social media and video networks reached 54 percent, overtaking both television news at 50 percent and news websites and apps at 48 percent, for the first time in the survey's run.

What the evidence says

According to the report's published methodology, the underlying fieldwork was conducted online by YouGov from mid-January to the end of February 2025, using nationally representative quotas for age, gender and region in every market, with additional education and political quotas applied in some. The executive summary also states that, globally, weekly use of any social video for news has grown from 52 percent in 2020 to 65 percent in 2025, and that Facebook and YouTube each reach roughly a third of the global sample weekly for news, ahead of Instagram and WhatsApp at 19 percent and TikTok at 16 percent. These are self-reported survey figures about news consumption habits, not platform-disclosed traffic or watch-time data.

The sample and the variance

The methodology page states plainly that online, non-probability samples under-represent older and less affluent populations, that no conventional margin of error can be computed for this design, and that the Institute treats differences of two percentage points or less as not meaningful. In India, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, the report states its sample represents younger, English-speaking internet users rather than the national population. The 54-48 US comparison describes where a nationally quota-sampled group of internet-using adults says it gets news, in the weeks after a specific US presidential transition, not a measurement of total news traffic or attention across platforms.

What to try next

A publisher weighing platform strategy can reasonably note that the report documents a specific, dated crossover in the US and rising social-video news use globally, but should cite the survey's fielding window and non-probability caveats alongside any single percentage. This is an editorial reading of a well-documented survey, not a claim that any platform will keep gaining news attention at the same pace.

• Does a cited figure describe weekly platform use for news, or overall platform use for any purpose?
• Is the market in question one of the four the report itself flags as not nationally representative?
• Was the figure fielded before or after the specific political event the executive summary says shaped the 2025 US results?

The 2025 report is transparent about its own sampling limits in a way that makes its headline comparisons more, not less, useful, provided those limits travel with the figures cited from it.