Digital news consumers increasingly control how they view content

[Commentary] The takeaway from Reuters’ vast new study of the world’s digital news consumers is that the disruptive trends publishers have been grappling with the last few years have crystallized into something more lasting, not just in the United States but around the world. Readers deplore online ads, particularly the personalized ones that follow them from site to site. They still don’t want to pay for news. They don’t find tablets all that exciting for reading news. And the homepage is diminishing fast, usurped by Facebook (not so much Twitter). The biggest surprise: Using apps to block ads has gone mainstream.

In some respects, the reader hasn’t changed. Most have never really liked ads but have put up with them, by flipping past them in the old days of newspapers. But paper didn’t offer a button to erase ads. The ads didn’t blink annoyingly. The car ads didn’t follow them from the local news section to the baseball box scores. Now readers, not publishers, control what they want to see. Consumers are in charge of news -- how they see it, when they’ll consume it, what they’ll pay for it -- and if publishers want to survive, they better figure out a way to get more economically in sync with them.

[Michael Rosenwald is a staff writer at the Washington Post]