On today's podcast episode, we discuss how the time we spend with media is changing—a double milestone for digital and mobile, when time spent watching CTV will catch up with linear TV, and why social media time will fall for the first time ever. Tune in to the discussion with host Marcus Johnson, director of forecasting Oscar Orozco, and forecasting writer Ethan Cramer-Flood.

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Episode Transcript:

Marcus Johnson (00:00):

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Ethan Cramer-Flood (00:28):

Digital is a whole bunch of different activities. You could be scrolling social media, you could be watching a streaming service, you could be listening to digital audio. If we divide all those up into the discreet activities that they are, TV is actually still ahead of that. There's nothing in the country that people spend more time per day on than they do watching TV.

Marcus Johnson (00:49):

Hey gang, it's Monday, July 22nd. Oscar, Ethan, and listeners, welcome to the Behind the Numbers Daily an E-Marketer podcast. I'm Marcus. Today I'm joined by two people. One of them is our principal forecasting writer. He's based in New York City. It's of course Ethan Cramer-Flood.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (01:05):

Hello Marcus. Good to be back.

Marcus Johnson (01:07):

Hey, fella. We're also joined by one of our senior directors of forecasting, who's based in New York as well, who wanted us to call him the King of Europe because his team just won the European Cup, Spain that is. It's Mr. Oscar Orozco.

Oscar Orozco (01:19):

That is right. Viva España. Hello, listeners. Hello, Marcus. Happy to be back.

Marcus Johnson (01:24):

Hello. I'm not really happy to have you at all, but I had to have you on the episode because of what we're talking about. Otherwise, I would've avoided you for one year. But congratulations to Oscar and to the Spanish men's soccer team-

Oscar Orozco (01:35):

Thank you very much.

Marcus Johnson (01:36):

... football team for winning another European Cup. It dovetails with my fact of the day who has won the most Euro Cups and World Cups? I have men's and women's. Men's Euro Cups, who's won the most?

Ethan Cramer-Flood (01:49):

It's not Spain?

Oscar Orozco (01:49):

I know all of these.

Marcus Johnson (01:50):

Unfortunately, it's Spain. Do you know all of them? Okay, so Ethan probably should go. Ethan, you're right. Yes. It's Men's Euro Spain of won four Men's World Cup. Oscar, do you know this one?

Oscar Orozco (02:01):

Brazil with five.

Marcus Johnson (02:02):

Indeed. Women's Euros. Ethan, any guesses? This one's insane.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (02:07):

Germany.

Marcus Johnson (02:08):

Yes. Bang. Well played.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (02:10):

Really?

Marcus Johnson (02:10):

With eight.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (02:11):

Whoa.

Marcus Johnson (02:12):

The next closest is Norway with two.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (02:15):

Wow.

Marcus Johnson (02:16):

Which is insane. And women-

Oscar Orozco (02:17):

Pretty much dominated for 30 years. That's what it was.

Marcus Johnson (02:21):

Yeah. Chaos. English women, we won our first one recently. Congratulations to them. Hoping to get a second next year. And the Women's World Cup is of course?

Ethan Cramer-Flood (02:29):

Team USA?

Oscar Orozco (02:30):

USA?

Ethan Cramer-Flood (02:31):

It is the U.S. indeed with four. So congratulations to Oscar.

Oscar Orozco (02:36):

Thank you very much.

Marcus Johnson (02:37):

I'm happy for you. Not congratulations to Paul Werner, who is an Argentinian fan and they won the Copa America and of course the World Cup. And he emailed me today with a subject line episode idea, and it wasn't anything to do with work, it was just him bragging.

Oscar Orozco (02:52):

He was wearing the jersey the other day. Did he send you a picture of that?

Marcus Johnson (02:57):

A whole email. Please don't. I have not done-

Ethan Cramer-Flood (02:57):

I would listen to that.

Marcus Johnson (02:59):

That makes one. Anyway, today's real topic, how the time we spend with media is changing.

Marcus Johnson (03:11):

In today's lead, we'll cover how time spent with media is changing, knowing on the news today. So let's get to it. Gents, you both work on the forecasting team that has just updated our time spent with media numbers, looking at how folks across media spend their time. We're going to go through some of the things that jumped out to us, some milestones, some interesting findings in some of the data, but I wanted to go top line for a second here.

Marcus Johnson (03:35):

This is overall time spent with media. How much time per day do we spend with media across the adult population? Well, overall time spent with media is still somehow growing. That's what jumped out to me. Today we estimate that Americans spend 12 hours and 37 minutes with media per day. Seems impossible because you're barely awake for that long. But the way we count it is if you're on your smartphone whilst you're watching TV, that's an hour for smartphone and an hour for TV. So they can be stacked on top of each other, but it's still 12 hours, 37 minutes. And by 2026, we expect folks to add another 10 minutes to that total. Gents, any reaction to this top line number?

Ethan Cramer-Flood (04:12):

It's a ludicrous number, but if you think about it, if you think about your own behavior and how much time per day you're either staring at a phone or have the TV on or have audio playing or watching the news or whatever you're doing, you're surfing the internet. It outrageously adds up. And yeah, it tracks.

Oscar Orozco (04:30):

And multitasking. Have you seen people doing three things at once, even four? Just wait until Alpha comes along. It's going to get even higher.

Marcus Johnson (04:41):

Wait till who comes along?

Oscar Orozco (04:42):

Alpha.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (04:42):

Gen Alpha.

Oscar Orozco (04:43):

Gen Alpha.

Marcus Johnson (04:44):

Oh, Gen Alpha. I thought it was a new streaming service. We have quad box.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (04:48):

Every successive generation is better at staring at multiple screens at the same time. And by our calculations, that would count as three hours. If you're one hour on your phone while watching TV with the volume down and you've got Spotify playing or whatever, who knows? Maybe you have two phones.

Marcus Johnson (05:05):

This is my dad.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (05:06):

You have a tablet. So that's going to be four hours of media time in one hour of real life, which for some of us, that just sounds like a headache, but in fact, that's how it's going to be.

Marcus Johnson (05:16):

My dad is not Gen Alpha, but I once caught him watching American football on the TV, basketball on his tablet and baseball on his phone, and he was 100% asleep. So it was a complete waste of time. But anyway-

Ethan Cramer-Flood (05:28):

Sleep, that doesn't count. I don't know. We draw the line somewhere.

Oscar Orozco (05:31):

Constant mad book.

Marcus Johnson (05:31):

He was watching the Knicks, so it makes sense. Oh, shots fired at New York teams, but not this year because they'll probably be really good. Okay, Oscar, you're going to kick us off with one other trend apart from the one I started us off with that you've seen in the data for time spent.

Oscar Orozco (05:46):

This is my favorite forecast of the year, Marcus. I'm so happy to talk about this whenever we do. [inaudible 00:05:52]. I'll start with the first one really, which is kind of like a double milestone story about devices and total digital time. So when looking at just adults, U.S. adults, in 2024 this year, digital time will surpass eight hours a day. First time we've ever seen that. Eight hours. When looking at mobile time, it's going to be the first year that we track four hours a day on average. So what people are spending with their mobile devices, mainly smartphones, but that does count tablets as well. So some crazy numbers.

Oscar Orozco (06:22):

Really what's driving that time we were just discussing a second ago. So one other way of framing that really is top line digital time spent growth this year it's about three percentage points is what we think it's going to grow. Really when we look at it from the device standpoint like mobile, it's a little bit under actually, it's about 2% growth. So mobile time is huge, but we're seeing growth even from other connected devices. We're talking about people using their smartwatches and the connected cars and smart speakers and even appliances. So just so much digital, people are connected all the time and it's driving that time.

Marcus Johnson (07:02):

Okay, so we've got digital eight hours a day this year, mobile at four hours a day. What's behind some of that growth? I guess it's only at two to 3%, but apart from the milestones, is there a story if you scratch below the surface of digital or mobile?

Oscar Orozco (07:18):

Yeah, aside from what I just mentioned on all these devices and how connected that we are now, that's part of what's driving it. So I would also call out CTVs. CTV is really, I was looking at the numbers before here and back five years ago seems so long ago. CTV time was at 59 minutes a day. And we're talking about-

Marcus Johnson (07:39):

Wow.

Oscar Orozco (07:39):

Yeah, exactly which low compared to how much time we spend connected on our televisions. But when you look at the gap now in minutes with linear TV, it's only 40 minutes and in two years that gap's going to be nine minutes. So much growth on that top line is really being driven by the CTVs. And that's really a lot of this sub OTT platforms. The Max's the Netflix's the Disney+'s, so that's where a lot of this time is coming from.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (08:09):

I don't know if you mentioned, but so CTV is up over two hours now. So you mentioned it was at 59 minutes just a few years ago. Now it's well over two hours.

Oscar Orozco (08:16):

Well over two hours.

Marcus Johnson (08:17):

Okay.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (08:17):

And that's the part of the time you're looking at your fancy connected TV where you're using internet connected applications, not the part where you maybe you are watching traditional cable if you are.

Oscar Orozco (08:29):

Exactly, exactly.

Marcus Johnson (08:30):

So yeah, that I thought was fascinating. CTV getting closer to linear traditional TV and as Oscar mentioned, this year, adults spending 40 more minutes with TVs versus CTVs. But in two years time, by 2026, that gap closing from 40 minutes to 10 minutes. So still ahead for linear TV, but CTV right behind it and kind of flirting with the idea of overtaking it in another year or maybe two after that. Ethan, your first trend is related to traditional TV.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (08:59):

I want to talk about the other side. So Oscar mentioned eight hours of digital time per day, but as you, Marcus, mentioned in the beginning, there's 12 and a half hours that we're trying to account for. So traditional is still significant. That's kind of a big number. You might not think about it that way because we're so used to thinking of traditional media as dying, but TV is still a pretty big deal. But my story is actually about its decline because for the first time ever, TV will drop under three hours per day. Now your reaction to that data point probably depends on your perspective in society, right? So if I say-

Marcus Johnson (09:36):

Your generation.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (09:36):

Yeah, your generation. So say the average adult American now spends less than three hours per day, 2:55 is our figure to Gen X or to the baby boomer generation. That sounds like an incredibly small number compared to what we used to hear about. Oh, people spend X so many hours per day watching TV rotting their brains. So that's a very small number compared to TV's prime. But for a lot of the younger generation, their figure is zero for traditional linear TV. So 2:55 a day actually sounds like a lot, but for us this is a big moment. It's the first time it's ever dropped under three hours. And so that's worth highlighting.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (10:13):

I would also highlight that traditional linear TV is still actually the number one single individual media related activity in the country despite Oscar's, gigantic eight-hour digital media number. Of course, digital together is gargantuan, but TV as one thing, digital is a whole bunch of different activities. You could be scrolling social media, you could be watching a streaming service, you could be listening to digital audio. If we divide all those up into the discrete activities that they are, TV is actually still ahead of that. There's nothing in the country that people spend more time per day on than they do watching TV, even though so many people spend zero. So that three-hour figure is still substantial.

Oscar Orozco (10:50):

And Ethan, I liked how you framed it too, what we were discussing a bit earlier and you said all these major platforms, you combine Netflix with Facebook with YouTube and those numbers combined still don't really reach the scale of TV. So that's kind of one way to really think about how ubiquitous TV is.

Marcus Johnson (11:10):

The thing that jumps out to me every single time we talk about TV, which is across generations. Baby Boomers, close to five hours per day with TV, Gen Z, less than an hour. So you've got just a four-hour chasm between the two extreme generations. Gen X, three, millennials an hour and a half. I don't know if there's a generational divide as large as there is in terms of media usage-

Ethan Cramer-Flood (11:35):

Which is why TV is going to continue to decline precipitously, but it still has this really big lead. I think even a few years from now to the extent of the end of our podcast period, TV still has a lead. It's going to be a while before any individual digital activity actually passes it.

Marcus Johnson (11:50):

As you mentioned, it drops below three hours this year, but that's two hours and 55 minutes. And then next year it drops six minutes and the year after that it drops five minutes. So this is by no means a freefall-

Ethan Cramer-Flood (12:01):

Right, exactly.

Marcus Johnson (12:02):

... it's a slow and steady. All right then. So you mentioned a number of different activities, digital activities that you could be doing. One of them, which people have started doing to replace the new TV is watching subscription streaming services and Ethan, your next trend is about this.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (12:18):

Yeah, I'll keep going on this one. So the other major thing that you do when you're staring at that giant big screen in your living room, which is frequently now a CTV, is when you actually switch it onto its internet connectivity. We're watching streaming services. So in this case I'm specifically talking about the paid ones, subscription OTT we call it. And the amount of time that adults spend watching subscription OTT is rapidly approaching two hours a day. That's pretty big. It's at 1:49 this year, but it'll be at two hours shortly. That's big news because subscription OTT is now the single most time-consuming digital activity more so than social media, more so than audio, more so than any other activity you can think of. However-

Marcus Johnson (13:05):

That's paid video as well.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (13:06):

These are the paid ones, so if you add up all of the ways that you can watch digital video on your CTV or on your laptop or on your desktop, that would include all the free stuff, that would include YouTube, FAST services as we call them, free ad-supported TV. We're not talking about that. I'm just talking about the big streaming services that you pay for, whether ad-supported or not. So it's coming up on two hours. That's obvious. This tracks, we know those things are a big deal, but the news is that the growth is actually starting to decline. And so while streaming has been a big deal for a bunch of years now, and we all know Netflix and Disney+ and Hulu and Max and Paramount, this is what we're talking about, they have had explosive growth for a while, but growth is starting to decline.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (13:49):

And this actually aligns with my previous story about how it's not actually going to catch traditional TV anytime soon. It's still big, it's the biggest individual digital activity, but growth is slowing, which is interesting. There's just so many digital activities, there's so many other things we can be doing. We're not going to continue to sit with Netflix longer and longer and longer and longer all the time. It's going to settle in and it seems like we're getting to a point where it's starting to settle in.

Oscar Orozco (14:15):

And there's just so many platforms too, right Ethan? You would agree with me here that perhaps there was a point where people were trying out a lot of platforms and we're now settling on those three or four favorite platforms that we're spending more time on. So I think that's having kind of a little bit of a negative impact on that time spent. On the positive I would actually say a lot of this shift to ad supported tiers has actually helped the engagement cause. When you look at Netflix, that's been positive for them with subscriptions. I think when this first happened, we thought are people who are on the ad supported tiers going to spend less time? I don't think we've necessarily seen that as much with some of these platforms. So that's been positive.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (14:55):

Yeah, the ad tier experiment is undeniably a success basically across the board. And there's still growth. These minutes are going to continue to tick up. It's just not in big chunks anymore.

Marcus Johnson (15:08):

And this is just fascinating. This is close to hours for the paid stuff because I was looking at overall digital video and folks spend twice as long with all digital video, not just subscription streaming services. So this is like we've mentioned, things like YouTube, Tubi, things like that. And it's also growing faster. So all digital video is still adding about 10 minutes a year, crossing the four-hour mark next year, then 4:10 the year after that to Ethan's point, still growing, still adding a number of minutes per year, but not seeing that explosive growth that we saw a couple of years ago.

Marcus Johnson (15:38):

Oscar, for our final trend, we're going to turn our attention to another activity. One that I guess used to hold the crown, Ethan social networking. Is that the activity that subscription streaming services stole the crown from?

Ethan Cramer-Flood (15:50):

That sounds right.

Oscar Orozco (15:51):

It depends on how we bucket it, but I would say yes.

Marcus Johnson (15:53):

Yes. Okay. And Oscar, your final trend is about that?

Oscar Orozco (15:56):

Yeah. Great. So for the other trends we've been discussing, we really have been looking at the time spent averaged out across a whole adult population in the U.S. For this one specifically, I think it's key to look at minutes across just users, just users of the media type or the platform. And for this it's social time. So the big headline really is for the first time ever, we expect a decline in time spent with social networks across just users of social networks. While it's only one minute, we've actually never tracked the decline before. So it is pretty big news.

Marcus Johnson (16:31):

Wow.

Oscar Orozco (16:32):

Yeah, there's a lot of dynamics at play there.

Marcus Johnson (16:35):

What's driving this?

Oscar Orozco (16:36):

We look at it from a platform by platform standpoint, and I think driving it really is Facebook, for example, Facebook, we've seen really strong declines. 2023 was kind of a strong year for them, and we expect that there'll be some declines there. A lot of it is also Snap, X that are not performing as well. And that's been reflected on engagement as well.

Marcus Johnson (17:00):

Even TikTok I think was down. We're expecting-

Oscar Orozco (17:02):

Tiktok.

Marcus Johnson (17:02):

... to be down a minute or two. There's only so much time you can spend with these platforms. Obviously TikTok going through a very tumultuous time, and even TikTok was down a minute or two. I think Instagram was flat.

Oscar Orozco (17:12):

Instagram is a little positive. But yeah, TikTok was really that-

Marcus Johnson (17:13):

Oh, yeah?

Oscar Orozco (17:15):

Slightly, it's very flat. We have year-over-year growth and time spent at a little over 1%. But yes, the TikTok factor, that's what I wanted to bring us home on. That is the big impact because TikTok, we've seen such crazy growth over the last few years and we're now tracking a slight decline this year. And that ultimately is having an impact on the top line numbers there. Let me shout out Reddit very quickly. It's the one platform where we're seeing very strong growth, a little over 11% growth in time spent this year. A lot of this hype from the IPO I think has had a positive impact on the platform. They're differentiating themselves very well. So Reddit is one of the positive platforms there.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (17:56):

I like how you guys gave a really technical answer to the question of why this is happening, instead of just saying that social media is a nightmare and people are sick of it, but okay, yes, sure, the driver is X, Y, and Z, that those guys just said.

Marcus Johnson (18:07):

That might be some of it. But yeah, it's still an hour and 52 minutes amongst users this is of social networks per day, an hour and 52 per day.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (18:16):

It's a lot of time.

Marcus Johnson (18:17):

It's still a lot.

Oscar Orozco (18:18):

And one other thing I'd call out, social video, nearly 60% of time with social platforms is spent with video. So that's really keeping up that time. I was looking at our estimates that would exclude video from the equation and time has been dropping a couple one to two minutes a day since 2021 there. So it's really that push to video. And every platform has some sort of video product now.

Marcus Johnson (18:42):

It's been a quick shift. I believe that 60% of all time you spend with social networks being watching video on those platforms that I think was about 30% four years ago or so. So it's been quite a shift from a third to two-thirds of your time on social networks being watching video. And so that huge part of the story, of course. Well you should look out for Ethan's full report on these numbers, U.S. time spent with Media 2024. That comes out in August as well as these numbers being on eMarketer.com if you're a pro plus user. Oscar, you said they're also going to be sprinkled in a couple of other reports.

Oscar Orozco (19:18):

Yeah. Yuri Wormser, he's covering connected device time. So it's a great report. And that's also coming out right around the time that Ethan's is coming as well. So I definitely look out for that one.

Marcus Johnson (19:29):

So pick your favorite. I'm kidding. You can read both if you have time. That's all we've got time for today's episode. Thank you so much to my guests, thank you to Ethan.

Ethan Cramer-Flood (19:38):

Yeah, and shout out to Oscar and the rest of the team for putting these numbers together. I just make the pretty words. They do the hard work.

Marcus Johnson (19:45):

Thank you to Oscar.

Oscar Orozco (19:46):

Thank you Ethan. No, and really happy to be here. And yeah, check out these reports. Ethan, you do a great job with it as well, and contextualizing all the numbers. So yeah, happy to be here. Thanks Marcus.

Marcus Johnson (19:57):

No, thank you to Spain, but thank to Victoria. She edits the show. Stuart runs the team. Sophie does our social media and of course, thank you to everyone listening, especially our former colleague Val. We miss you. Shout out to her. We hope to see you tomorrow for the Behind the Numbers Daily. That's an eMarketer podcast.