Online Nations 2025: What It Means for You

This week, Joe Green, our Client Director at The Specialist Works, unwraps the latest Online Nations report to give you a top line overview of how audiences are behaving. 🎁🔥

It’s the most wonderful time of the year folks – and this year we’ve been spoilt by our friends at Ofcom with an early Christmas gift. The digital landscape has (shocking I know) shifted yet again – so this is an update that every Entrepreneurial Brand needs to hear.

What's Happening? 📱💥

Ofcom’s report confirms what we’ve all suspected: the nation’s spending record levels of time online, AI’s starting to change the way we search (you may have read our article last week on the impact of AI Overviews on paid search) and smartphones dominate (77% of all online time).

Online video continues to surge, with YouTube now reaching 94% of UK adults – and TikTok’s up 14% YoY.

Reddit is also booming, with a huge 28% growth – one of the fastest climbing platforms.

Reddit combines the best of social media, user generated content and moderated “subreddits” that harken back to those old school days of interweb forums. No wonder consumers are flocking there, in a world of never-ending and unregulated content. The challenge remains, however, how advertisers operate authentically in this space. A rushed bodge job, aspiring to befriend the Reddit community could easily backfire and alienate.

Our Specialist View?🔮

Online behaviour continues to evolve - and your media strategy must evolve with it. However, while there may be changes in the platforms and media brands consumption, audience behaviour is much slower to shift.

So, while there’s much debate over broadcasters vs. streaming vs. online video, ultimately 84% of video viewing at home is via the TV set. The big screen in your living room is still the place people want to watch content.

Another example from this report, 6 in 10 adults (59%) use an online intermediary (e.g. social media platforms) for their news consumption. While this could be used to feed the “death of new brands” narrative, it should be viewed alongside the fact that 97% of online adults visited a news service, spending an average of 10 minutes on these services per day.

The BBC alone was used by 77% of UK online adults in a month, The Sun was at 45% and The Guardian sits in third with 44%. So yes, audiences are seeing the news on different platforms, but they are visiting trusted news brands in far greater numbers.

The digital landscape adds great complexity to finding your audience and allocation of resources, but the core tenets of planning should still be adhered to – understand your audience, look for opportunities to be disruptive to the status quo, and understand the right balance of reach, frequency and attention to deliver your objective.

So, what should you do? 🔮

Be less obvious, more relevant: From Discord servers to TikTok trends, the best opportunities aren’t ever the most obvious. Thinking outside personal experience can harvest high value attention if you hit a contextually and culturally relevant moment. We can help by using our internal planning tools & nous to find those moments that matter most.

Rethink SEO strategies: Search behaviour is changing fast and AI-powered summaries means content needs to be clear, credible, and optimised for summary boxes, not just a list of hyperlinks. 

Adapt and learn: If you’re looking to launch a brand centric campaign, consider where you want people to find your brand – when they are on the move, in moments of quiet me-time, or on the big screen in their living room? Once you’ve decided on that consider the relevant brands and platforms that your audience are engaging with. Audience first, platform second.

Stay agile: Test and learn on emerging platforms; don’t be singularly focused. Ensure you’ve got a measurement strategy that allows you to hone your plans.