Tracking News Use in Flanders through a Unified Media ID

The next speaker at ECREA 2014 is Kristin van Damme, whose interest is in the news media repertoire used by audiences. Audience activities across multiple platforms are a challenge to news publishers, which in Flanders have begun to introduce a unified Media ID audience tracking system across multiple news sites; this covers the entire Flemish news ecosystem.

To prepare this, Kristin surveyed almost 1000 Flemish news users to explore their willingness to utilise such a system – this explored their news repertoires as well as their use of existing login options. The study also explored multiple market introduction approaches to identify the approach most likely to be successful.

Users were surprisingly well-disposed to the idea of using the Media ID system, under specific circumstances (data protection, user-friendliness, etc.). This did not differ across demographics or technology affinity; different levels of interest in news, and of concern about privacy were significant differentiators, however. Media ID will be introduced in Flanders shortly.