Television remains firmly in first place and the Internet catches up with newspapers, even if in Italy it suffers even more than elsewhere on the advertising market. To reveal it is a fact-finding survey conducted by Agcom, according to which the online information medium consolidates its third position, being used by 42% of people who are actively interested in current events, with a distance of just 3 percentage points compared to newspapers.
Television is still in first place with over 80% of individuals choosing it for information, but the web is proving to be a source of primary importance above all for the search for news concerning international and national current affairs: thus excluding local information, still linked to the tradition of the paper newspaper, The Internet is now the second means of communication after television.
A revolution which, however, is slower in Italy than elsewhere: in the USA, for example, it is true that most people still rely on TV, but the percentage is much lower (71%), and above all newspapers hold up better (50%) and the comeback of the web is more marked (46 %). The radio is also resisting better (42%), which in Italy has completely collapsed (18%) while in the United Kingdom, for example, more than half of users still use it to get information: the same percentage (53%) of those who still buy the paper newspaper, even if the dependence on TV is higher than that of the boot (85%).
Even the economic contribution, in terms of percentage of GDP, is not yet up to par with the more developed countries: due to the advertising crisis, also revealed yesterday by a UBS study focused on the television medium which caused considerable concern for Mediaset investors on the stock market, Agcom has estimated that the contribution provided by the internet to the economy in 2016 will represent a share of GDP greater than 3%, reaching a value of at least 59 billion euros. Not even that much, if you think that it was estimated that in 2010 the economic value of the online sector in the G-20 countries was equal to 4% of GDP, and that in 2016 it will greatly exceed 5%; is that The Internet, on average, contributes over 20% of the annual growth of the gross domestic product of an economically advanced country.
However, to fully understand the strategic value of the internet for a country's economy, it is also necessary to consider the positive effects not directly captured through GDP, such as, for example, the value of products and services purchased through traditional channels but for which you searched for information on the net, e-commerce, public administration e-procurement, and online advertising.
Precisely on this point, Italy is lagging behind other EU countries. In fact, the comparison leaves no room for doubt: in a advertising market increasingly dominated by Google (31,5% of the market share in 2012, very far ahead of Facebook with 4,1%), the Italian online market has indeed grown since 2009 (nearly doubling from 818 million to 1,5 billion in 2012) but is very far from better continental standards, remaining well behind the UK (6,64 billion in 2012 from 4 in 2009), Germany (from 3 to 4,55 billion), and France (from 1,7 to 2,77 billion). In a market – the European one – which is worth a total of more than 24 billion euros in 2012 and which approaches the US one (28,4 billion, in euros), only Spain is doing worse than us, which two years ago still did not reach the one billion euro turnover for online advertising.
The real difficulty, according to what emerges from the analysis of the Guarantor Authority for Telecommunications, paradoxically is for the so-called "digital native" information sites: in fact, Italians are increasingly using the web to get information, but almost two thirds of them do does by visiting the online pages of major newspapers (in particular Repubblica.it with 17,3% and Corriere.it with 9,5%) or by browsing traditional search engines (such as Google News, which is the first choice for 21,5, XNUMX%) and/or social networks, which are increasingly becoming not only tools for sharing but also for disseminating news. And so it happens that 7,1% of web users turn to Facebook to "get information", while the native digital publications, which are born on the web, all together attract only 2,4%. Is advertising more of a lifeline for historic publications than an opportunity for startups?
