Don’t believe everything you see on the Internet – but TV is a different story.

A recent study from Triton Digital reveals that consumers trust traditional media advertisements more than digital media advertisements. The findings show that 45 percent of respondents rated television as the most trusted medium, followed by 20 percent who chose newspapers and 18 percent who chose radio. But disappointingly for Web marketers, only 13 percent of respondents chose digital media and only 4 percent chose social media as their most trusted media source.

The survey results also show that trust has a correlation with the success of advertisements in each medium. For example, more than 64 percent of consumers acknowledged that they have made a purchase after seeing a product or service advertised on television, radio or in a newspaper. 

However there is a bright spot for the Internet, because the results found that 61 percent of consumers are more willing to trust their own Internet research over television commercials (28 percent), radio commercials (21 percent) or newspaper ads (16 percent). 

“While digital media continues to explode in popularity and affect traditional media usage, the underlying trust of media consumers toward digital compared to traditional media are not yet equal,” says Triton VP of Business Strategy, Jim Kerr. “Similarly, traditional media advertising continues to prove effective and more likely to influence purchase decisions than digital ads.”