Online Newspapers, Live TV Channels, Radios

The Netherlands was once abundant in the circulation of newspapers, broadcast, and view of Televisions, but in the past 15 years, online media became the most popular media for the Dutch people, with Facebook being the dominant social networking site. Both the rate of consumption of TV and newspapers have gone down, though still, the Dutch people watch 3 hours of television since 2016.

Due to the low use of the newspaper, the paid circulation has also dropped. Newspaper circulation in Netherland is divided into two categories, national and regional newspapers. About 55% of the circulation is national, but the rest isn’t wholly regional. It depends on individual cities. Some of them have both national and regional newspapers; others have mostly regional. Some of the national newspapers are “De Telegraaf,” “Metro,” “NRC Next,” “Nederlands Dagblad” and many more. Among all the national newspapers, “Metro” is a free newspaper and the rest is paid.

The regional newspapers are “De Limburger,” “De Stentor,” “BN De Stem” etc. Netherland is a country which believes in freedom of expression, but they need to abide by the three articles (Article 6,7 and 13) of the Dutch Constitution. Each article states a different specification and creates a border for the journalists in some categories. Journalists cannot insult anyone who belongs to a royal family; they can’t create any who will violate state security.

The first actual radio station in the Netherlands was established in 1919. The Netherlands Public Broadcasting system included the country’s various religious and social groups, all organized their institutions, with financial help from the government and incorporated broadcasting.

The broadcasting associations share seven radio channels which are NPO Radio 1, NPO Radio 2, NPO 3FM, NPO Radio 4, NPO Radio 5, NPO Radio 6, and FunX. Radio in the Netherlands is mostly music radio. The most popular stations are commercial stations Radio 538, Sky, Q music and Veronica, public broadcasters 3FM, ORN (regional) and Radio 2. In a survey of 2016, the Dutch people spend 2.5 to 3 hours on listening to radio per day.

In 2016, 92.6% of the Dutch people, watched at least one minute of television. The rate of consumption of television started to decrease from 2014. Still, there are 8,100,000 television sets. The television market is divided between some commercial networks, such as RTL Nederland, and a system of public broadcasters sharing three channels, NPO 1, NPO 2, and NPO 3.

There are some imported programs in foreign languages which are translated into their local language and broadcasted. Some of the regional television channels are Omrop Fryslân (Friesland), in West Frisian, RTV Noord (Groningen), RTV Drenthe (Drenthe), RTV Oost (Overijssel). Others are national channels like NPO 1, NPO 2, NPO 3 and international channels like BVN and VRT. Usually, the programs are about soccer games, reality shows, song contest, game contest, etc.

Internet in the Netherlands has high penetration. About 92% of people are online. Facebook had 9.8 million Dutch users in 2016, Linkedin had 4.2 million users monthly (6 million Dutch have an account), Twitter had 2.2 million active users a month, 2.1 million people said they used Instagram, Pinterest had 2 million users, 1 million people, said they used Snapchat, 1.2 million visited a Tumblr page, Google+ had 740,000 monthly users in the Netherlands, WhatsApp was installed on 11.2m Dutch smartphones, and 7 million people said to use it on a daily basis (Marketingfacts 2017).