One newsletter figure sits inside a much larger reach survey

The revenue mechanism

Publishers rarely have a comparable, cross-market figure for how many people actually use email to reach news, as opposed to social feeds or search results. The Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2025, its largest edition yet, covers 48 markets on six continents and asks respondents which of several gateways they used to come across news stories online in the past week. Fieldwork for the underlying survey was carried out by YouGov using an online questionnaire fielded from the middle of January to the end of February 2025, according to the report's own methodology section, giving the newsletter figure a specific, dated data-collection window even though the report itself is presented as a single annual edition.

What the documents show

Across the full sample, the report states email was used as a news gateway in the last week by 15% of respondents, behind search at 45%, social media and video networks at 43%, and direct website or app visits at 33%, with mobile alerts at 21% and aggregators at 16%. The base for that figure is stated as the total sample across all markets, 97,055 respondents. The report's own text adds a qualitative distinction worth carrying forward: mobile alerts perform evenly across age groups, while email newsletters, which it separately describes as effective for building loyalty among existing users, tend to perform much better with older audiences than younger ones, according to the report's own framing rather than a separately cited study.

The assumptions exposed

The report's own methodology page states plainly that the survey uses a non-probability, online-panel sampling approach, meaning a conventional margin of error cannot be computed, and that differences of two percentage points or less should not be treated as meaningful. The 15% figure is therefore a single comparative snapshot from an online population weighted to national quotas, not a probability-sample measurement of an entire national population, and it says nothing about whether the news people receive by email came from an independent newsletter, a legacy outlet's own list, or an aggregator. It also measures only whether email was used at all in the past week, not how often, nor what share of a person's total news consumption email newsletters actually represent.

What to check before you rely on it

This is an editorial checklist. A publisher citing this figure to a sponsor or partner should state the base, the sampling method, and the specific wording of the underlying question, rather than presenting 15% as a precise measurement of newsletter reach specifically, since the question covers email as a broader gateway category.

• Is the 15% figure being cited with its actual base and sampling caveats attached?
• Does the market being discussed match one of the 48 markets actually surveyed?
• Is the broader category of email being conflated with newsletters specifically, when the report does not make that distinction?

The figure is genuine primary survey data with disclosed methodology, which is more than most newsletter reach claims can offer, but it measures a broader behaviour than any single publisher's own subscriber engagement.