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A survey carried out by Pew Internet in the USA has shown for the first time how the digital world has broken up the stranglehold of old, established news sources.

The survey, which questioned 2, 259 internet users about their online reading habits, revealed that 92% of users accessed news content on multiple platforms. Only a pitiful 7% rely on a single source to get their news. This represents a seismic shift in the media world, as newspapers and magazines have traditionally relied on a loyal subscription base as their audience.

Not only this, but internet users expect to get their news in formats and places that suit them. Fully 30% of respondents said they used personalization options to create their own custom homepages, and the majority also accessed news on the go through hand held devices and smart-phones.

The shift is critical, because it implies that old media brands are going to find themselves fighting for an audience in a way that would have seemed incredible just a decade ago. Today, people will happily accept news from a variety of sources and the carefully constructed brands that people like Rupert Murdoch have bought into are consequently on shaky ground.

As this younger generation grows up, accustomed to a much more diverse media/news landscape, the power of long-established brands such as News International is likely to wane. Furthermore, it isn’t even necessarily individual websites that are attracting people’s attention. Aggregators such as Digg.com are playing host to nothing more than a link, while a conversation around the content happens on their own space rather than on the property itself. Sharing links with friends is also an increasingly common phenomenon – bypassing even the mighty Google in the spread of content.

According to Pew:

“To a great extent, people’s experience of news, especially on the internet, is becoming a shared social experience as people swap links in emails, post news stories on their social networking site feeds, highlight news stories in their Tweets, and haggle over the meaning of events in discussion threads. For instance, more than 8 in 10 online news consumers get or share links in emails”

The future landscape of content discovery will represent a diverse information ****. This means a very fragmented picture for advertisers who are trying to find ways of reaching as many people as possible. It is likely that contextual advertising will become even more important in the web infrastructure, with content-relevant ads served by the likes of Google playing an increasing role.

This is likely to drive advertising revenues for content producers down, meaning that sites will increasingly look to fund their content operations through the addition of services ancillary to their news content. In the UK media scene, august operators such as the Telegraph have a fully fledged paid online dating section and most of the tabloids offer fripperies such as bingo games which they are developing as important revenue streams.

As the line between ‘news’ in the traditional sense and ‘news content’ in the modern sense becomes more and more blurred, it will be very interesting to see how a new generation of websites operate in this new environment. Either way, the increasingly social aspect of the internet will continue to play an ever more important role.