Mobile news consumption is broad but not uniform. In the United Kingdom, 70% of adults aged 16 and over used online sources for news in 2025, while 51% used social media for news. Across markets, younger audiences are more likely to make social and video networks their main source, while alerts, search, and aggregators shape how many people encounter publishers.
Contents
- Mobile and online reach
- Age and market differences
- Social and intermediary pathways
- Alerts, search, and aggregators
- What audiences encounter in feeds
- Reading frequency and older benchmarks
Mobile and online reach
Ofcom’s News Consumption in the UK 2025 Research Findings places online sources at the center of UK news use. In 2025, 70% of UK adults aged 16 and over used online sources for news, and 51% used social media for news. UK adults spent an average of 61 minutes per day consuming news during the same year. These figures describe online use across devices, so they are relevant to mobile audiences but are not smartphone-only measurements. Ofcom, News Consumption in the UK 2025 Research Findings
Time share shows why “online” is not the same as “direct publisher.” Online sources accounted for 42% of UK adults’ news-consumption time in 2025. Online intermediaries represented 31%, while direct use of publishers represented 11%. The intermediary share includes routes that stand between an audience and a publisher, such as social platforms, search, and aggregators.
Traditional channels still formed a substantial part of the time mix. Television accounted for 31% of news-consumption time, radio for 18%, print for 5%, and podcasts for 3% in the Ofcom measurement. These percentages are reported observations from the source; they should not be treated as a mobile-only allocation or recombined into new estimates.
| UK news-consumption measure | 2025 share or average |
|---|---|
| Adults using online sources | 70% |
| Adults using social media for news | 51% |
| Average daily news time | 61 minutes |
| Time from online sources | 42% |
| Time from online intermediaries | 31% |
| Time from direct publishers | 11% |
| Time from television | 31% |
| Time from radio | 18% |
Age and market differences
Age is one of the clearest dividing lines in mobile-relevant news use. Ofcom’s 2025 supporting slides report that 81% of UK adults aged 16–24 used online sources for news, compared with 37% of adults aged 75 and over. Social media reached 75% of the younger group and 18% of the older group. Television, including on-demand viewing, reached 63% of 16–24-year-olds and 74% of people aged 75 and over. Ofcom, News consumption in the UK 2025 supporting slides
| UK audience group | Online sources | Social media | Television, including on-demand |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adults aged 16–24 | 81% | 75% | 63% |
| Adults aged 75+ | 37% | 18% | 74% |
The international picture also varies by age and device orientation. In the 2025 Reuters Institute survey, 54% of U.S. adults aged 18–24 said social-media or video networks were their main news source. The corresponding share for U.S. adults aged 25–34 was 50%. These are survey shares for the stated U.S. age groups, not a general estimate for all smartphone users.
The Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report page also gives India-specific device measures, while not stating the measurement year for those India figures on the page. Among English-language Indian news users with internet access, 68% identified smartphones as their main device for online news, and 31% said they used only mobile devices to access online news. The geography, language, internet-access condition, and unstated measurement year matter when interpreting these results. Reuters Institute, Overview and key findings of the 2025 Digital News Report
Social and intermediary pathways
In the UK, the platforms used for news in 2025 show a distributed mobile pathway. Ofcom reports that 30% of adults aged 16 and over used Facebook for news. Instagram and YouTube each reached 18%, Google Search reached 16%, and X reached 14%. Each figure is a platform-specific share, so the groups can overlap.
The Reuters Institute’s cross-market reporting adds a wider view of platform differences. In 2025, 49% of the Reuters sample in Thailand used TikTok for news in the last week. The corresponding share was 12% in the U.S. sample and 11% in the European sample. The figures refer to the stated Reuters samples and should not be read as a single global rate.
Google Discover was accessed for news by 27% of the Reuters cross-market sample in 2025. In the U.S. sample, 9% used Newsbreak for news weekly. These figures illustrate how mobile news can arrive through a feed or an aggregator without a user beginning at a publisher’s own app or website.
For journalism and media innovation, the distinction between platform reach and publisher reach is important. A platform share indicates that respondents used a route for news; it does not establish how much time they spent there, which publishers they saw, or whether they clicked through. The Ofcom time measures likewise separate online intermediaries from direct publisher use rather than treating all digital exposure as a publisher relationship.
Alerts, search, and aggregators
Notifications are a potentially direct mobile route, but they are not universally enabled. Reuters Institute trend reporting says weekly use of news notifications had increased three times in many countries over the decade to 2025. At the same time, 79% of the Reuters cross-market sample had either never received news alerts or had disabled them in 2025. The two findings describe different aspects of notification use: growth in weekly use in many countries and the large share with no active alert relationship. Reuters Institute, Walking the notification tightrope: How to engage audiences while avoiding overload
The BBC News app was a notable UK alert source in the Reuters reporting. Its notifications reached 46% of UK respondents who received news alerts in 2025. Reuters Institute estimated that the BBC News app notifications reached around 4 million people in the UK that year. The audience figure is explicitly an estimate, not a count presented here as an independently verified total.
Search and aggregation were also substantial routes in Ofcom’s 2024 question about UK adults who used other websites or apps for news. Among that group, 71% used at least one search engine or news aggregator. Forty-eight percent used any search engine, 43% used any intermediary or aggregator, 44% used Google Search, and 18% used Google News. Ofcom notes that the question wording changed in 2024, so comparisons with earlier trend measures require caution. Ofcom, News consumption in the UK 2025 supporting slides
What audiences encounter in feeds
Mobile users do not encounter identical news environments across platforms. Among UK adults who used each service for news in 2025, 64% of X users saw news stories shown as trending. The corresponding figures were 63% for TikTok users, 58% for Facebook users, 56% for Instagram users, and 52% for Snapchat users. These measures describe what users encountered, not their assessment of whether the stories were accurate or important. Ofcom, News Consumption in the UK 2025 Research Findings
Regular UK users rated search engines and news aggregators more positively than social media on several qualities in 2025. For quality, 61% rated search engines or aggregators highly, compared with 46% for social media. For trustworthiness, the figures were 60% and 44%. For accuracy, they were 60% and 43%. For impartiality, they were 57% and 44%.
| Quality measure among regular UK users | Search engines/news aggregators | Social media |
|---|---|---|
| Quality | 61% | 46% |
| Trustworthiness | 60% | 44% |
| Accuracy | 60% | 43% |
| Impartiality | 57% | 44% |
The comparison is useful for understanding audience expectations, but it does not prove that every item delivered by one route is better than every item delivered by another. It reports how regular users rated the categories in the 2025 Ofcom research.
Reading frequency and older benchmarks
The available Pew mobile-device benchmark is older and should remain date-labelled. In a 2012 survey of U.S. smartphone owners, 41% of male smartphone owners consumed news daily, compared with 30% of female smartphone owners. Daily news consumption was 44% among smartphone owners with a college education and 31% among those with less than a college education. Pew Research Center, New Study Finds Half of U.S. Adults Have Mobile Internet – With Big Implications for News
Among U.S. smartphone news users in that 2012 Pew survey, 52% got news once a day on weekdays and 42% got news multiple times a day on weekdays. On weekends, 52% got news once a day and 32% got news multiple times a day. These figures are a historical benchmark for mobile news behavior, not a current estimate.
The older results are most useful when kept separate from the 2025 Ofcom and Reuters findings. They show that mobile news use was already measured by frequency and audience characteristics in 2012, while newer research describes a more platform-mediated environment involving social feeds, search, aggregators, video networks, and notifications. The dates, geographies, samples, and definitions differ, so the figures should be read as distinct observations rather than a continuous trend line.