Classification of Mexican audiences by their interest in digital news content and socioeconomic characteristics

Abstract

The news industry faces challenges due to the global macro and microeconomic environment. The current digital situation leads to the study of the characteristics of the audience interested in news content products. The central aim of this research is to classify the main attribute interest in digital news content in Mexico of the audience’s market by the attributes of age group, education level, and income level. This research is based on a survey of 2,005 digital news consumers in Mexico, directed in 2022 by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford for the annual Digital News Report Study. The statistical method used is data mining with decision trees that classify the audience by the attribute of interest in the news as the dependent variable and attributes of age groups, education level, and income level as independent variables. These findings confirm the segmentation of digital news consumers’ audiences. The classification in which the attributes of age groups, level of education, and income level are considered simultaneously concerning audiences’ interests indicates that some of the predictions made show that some attributes may not be significant in some subsets, except for age group. The lowest average interest in the news is between 18 and 24 years, and the highest average interest in the news, which is nearly very interested, has audiences over 35 years.