Over a half (55%) of UK adults have stopped browsing sites and looking for new content and products—instead they stick to two-three trusted sources of information. This data comes from the global media agency Carat’s Consumer Connection System research tool surveying 11,000 UK consumers and their media behaviour annually.
Among the top 5 trusted sites UK users have named BBC, Amazon, Google, ITV and eBay. 41% of the respondents say they prefer to rely on their friends’ recommendations on social media rather than doing an online research themselves. Interestingly, 44% say they check their friends’ updates on social media at least once a week, while 29% check them daily.
Millenials, in particular, trust friend’s recommendations most of all—49% of them prefer information from friends rather than ads. 33% say there is too much information on the internet, so the choice is hard and overwhelming.
Dan Hagen, Chief Strategy Officer at Carat, calls this situation the ‘choice fatigue’, while Lucy Moore, Associate Director, Carat, thinks that “overwhelmed consumers have a real appetite for curated and relevant content.”
She says: “The use of smart data can help publishers and advertisers create content that truly reflect readers’ needs and devise the most effective distribution strategies through which that content can find the right reader.”