Punters distrust blogs and trust TV
TV is still the most trusted medium for information, while blogs are the least, a large scale, 16-country survey has suggested.
The study by research house TNS included Australian consumers among its more than 27,000 participants, who were asked which source of information or recommendation they highly trusted.
Word-of-mouth narrowly beat all media channels. Friends came top with 42%, followed by TV news (41%), online news (40%) and newspapers (39%). Blogs came bottom with only around 10% of people trusting them. Don Ryan, VP of technology and media for TNS said:
“Online blogs have no real accountability. Although they may be a great source of entertainemnt and a useful source of information and reviews they are clearly highly subjective.”
Tim this is interesting particularly when contrasted with the Universal McCann study ‘When did we start trusting strangers” (http://tinyurl.com/434un9) and the Nielsen ‘Trust in advertising” (http://tinyurl.com/a2rh44 – getting old now).
Do you think maybe it’s a case of Punters don’t trust complete strangers on-line? That for a Blog to believed there has to be some history or brand recognition, after all I’m less inclined to believe a posting on a blog I’m not familiar with, but I trust more those that I ‘know’ e.g. Mumbrella.
As always with research it would be good to know what was the specific question(s) they asked.
It’ll be interesting to see this repeated in a year or two’s time. My bet would be that Tv will decline a little.
With blogs it remains to be seen – in the US the nuts and haters seem to be getting the upper hand in terms of audience, which might explain the low trust level. But it is also a question of how ‘blogs’ position themselves. Great sites like Techcrunch etc seem to run on an underlying blog platform but in many people’s minds are websites rather than blogs, which presumably gives them a higher trust level.
When does a blog become a website?
Has TNS released the Australian figures? They’d be very interesting to see.
At the time of writing, I couldn’t source numbers from TNS locally. It appears that this was only released out of the UK, US and Canada (PR demerits if so, TNS Oz), hence the lack of au-specific numbers.
But I’ll try again with TNS tomorrow, although it wouldn’t surprise me if it ends up being the New Year before we raise someone.
Love comments as I love the posts.
@Toto – When does a blog become a website?
When someones says so?
When you call yourself a website?