site.btaEuropean Commission Report: Only 15% of Bulgarians Pay for News Content

In Bulgaria and Hungary, only 15.3% of consumers pay for news content, according to a report presented on May 18 by the European Commission. The study covers a total of nine EU countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Spain and Sweden.

By comparison, 34.7% of Swedes pay for news, with Poles in second place at 29.5%. In Bulgaria, 86% of consumers get their news from TV, compared to 75% in the EU. Bulgaria and Sweden have the highest proportion of people who look for news online (60%). Bulgaria leads in the share of consumers (47%) who get their news from social networks.

In Bulgaria 74% of citizens look for news from free sources, compared to an EU average of 70%. In the nine countries surveyed, consumers were most often interested in news related to politics (56%) and society (50.5%), while interest in investigative journalism is around 22%, the data show.

The report's findings show that television remains the main source of news for Europeans (75%), but consumers are gradually shifting to online sources and they now take second place. There has been a gradual disappearance of small media, expressed in a 20% decline from 2008 to 2019.