Young Vietnamese Increasingly Turning to the Internet for News

Vietnamese youth are increasingly turning to online news sources over state TV, according to data issued by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) and Gallup. When asked to name the three media outlets that are their most important sources of information, almost three-fourths (74.1 percent) of those age 35 and older include state-run VTV among their responses, while less than half of those age 15-34 (48.6 percent) do so. Young people, in turn, are more likely to name online sources -- most commonly the popular Vietnamese news and information portals 24 Gio and Dantri.com, and the global social media giant Facebook.

“While television ownership remains almost ubiquitous, and frequency of TV and radio use has changed only slightly, the proportion of Vietnamese adults who use the Internet weekly or more continued to rise, from 26.3 percent in 2012 to 38.8 percent today,” explained Betsy Henderson, Director of Research, Training and Evaluation at Radio Free Asia. “Mobile ownership has grown by 10 percent since 2012, and it is the growing availability in web-enabled phones that is a key factor in rising Internet use in Vietnam.”