People increasingly trust people over corporations
I've been reading through news for the past few weeks and noticed an interesting pattern: People increasingly trust people over "traditional" corporations. Here are some stats to back this up:
People spend more and more time watching user-generated content
According to a recent study from the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) and YouGov, user-created content accounts gains on traditional media consumption. UGC accounted for 39% of weekly media hours consumed by Americans vs. 61% for traditional media.
The most dramatic difference was between teens, who spend 56% of their time on UGC people aged 55-plus who spend "just" 22% of their time on it. The main reason for this? Choice, it appears. "Twice as many consumers report difficulty finding something to watch on traditional TV or recorded DVR than on UCC platforms like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok."
Traditional news sites engagement/viewership plummets
According to recent Nielsen ratings, primetime news viewership was down 36% across the three major cable networks: Fox News, CNN and MSNBC. Also, app downloads dropped 33% for the top 12 mainstream publishers, according to data from Apptopia.
Engagement was down as well. Interactions (likes, comments, shares) dropped by 65% between 2020 and 2021 for major news publishers, despite more articles published (according to NewsWhip data).
Website visits were'nt spared as well. The top-performing news websites in the U.S. took a hit by 8% in the first 11 months of 2021, acording to SimilarWeb data.
Shopping on social media is outgrowing traditional e-commerce
According to a new study from Accenture, it's expected that social commerce industry will grow three times as fast as traditional e-commerce, to $1.2 trillion by 2025.
This comes in line with what's been going in the Asian market, where TikTok keeps stealing market share from traditional players like Alibaba.
What all of this means for indie founders
This is good news. People are increasingly preferring to interact with (and buy from) real people on social mediaover large, faceless corporations. And who could blame them? Big corporations like Amazon have been involved in slew of controversy.
It appears that the future of gaining people's trust is essentially staying true to your "human self" (however cliche that might mean). Do you agree?
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Many indie hackers don't like showing their face in front of people. Wonder how to appear "human" with this in mind...
Here are some ideas:
a) Get someone else to do it
b) Get over it. Really. You don't need to be a model to appear in front of a camera (being your "average Joe" will likely make you more trustworthy)
c) You could appear more "human" in writing as well. I mean, look at what type of style mainstream media publishes vs. people here on IH (it's quite different).
Hope this helped! If anyone else has other ideas, feel free to share.
Expected for TikTok to be leading the pack. People seem much more "human" and "authentic" than Instagram where "influencers" have started acting like big corps essentially.
There are some stats for your Instagram point:
https://medium.com/dealspotr/influencer-marketing-tips-millennials-trust-da946f0bce18
That's an interesting article, thanks for sharing!
Interesting to see this with some actual stats. I think one of the main reasons for this is because many mainstream media has been politicized (especially true for the erosion of mainstream news trust).
Agree, and also their views (both left and right) have started getting more extreme. It's quite easy to identify these days if a media outlet is politicized.