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Marketing and Digital Press: Information Consumption Patterns in Colombia During COVID19

Abstract:

COVID19 has had enormous consequences in the media. The pandemic has affected journalism by encouraging new informational newspaper consumption trends. This phenomenon has inevitably changed newspaper newsrooms since print versions started to decline in favor of digital ones. Since the beginning of the mentioned health crisis, information provided by media has become a highly citizenship demand. The study of the dynamics of information consumption is very relevant for understanding the potential journalism business transformation nowadays and in the years to come. Such a health crisis might open a scenario of opportunities and challenges to face by journalism worldwide. The objective of this research is to analyze the influence of COVID19 on newspaper digital edition consumption patterns. We have conducted an exploratory investigation based on the secondary data from Similarweb. Data focus on providing a portrait of Colombian newspapers reading habits during the most critical moments of COVID 19, the outbreak, from March to May 2020 (confinement and first wave), and the following months, from September to November 2020 (second wave). The results confirm the high impact of Covid-19 on digital edition demand on 15 Colombian newspapers during the first wave. Citizens who have traditionally been far away from media might have now been connected with media. However, results also reveal a dramatic decrease in unique visitors in the second wave, thus the potential audience benefits for media and advertisers might have been considered a missing opportunity to retain and maintain Covid-19 outbreak readership habits.