From Prime Time to Screen Time: How Our Attention Is Shifting | Behind the Numbers
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Hey gang, it's Friday, June 20th. I hope everyone had a terrific June teeth yesterday. Oscar, Ethan, and to everyone listening, welcome to Behind the Numbers, an eMarketer video podcast made possible by Synth. I'm Marcus, and joining me for today's conversation, we have two gents, both living in New York, coming to us live from the New York studio. We have the Senior Director of Forecasting, Oscar Orozco. Hi everybody. Hi Marcus. Good to be back. It's been a while. It's not been that long. Yeah.

We're also joined by principal forecasting writer Ethan Kramer-Flood. I'm in the studio. We're in the studio. In the studio. It's beautiful. It's freezing. Stop looking at each other. It's completely freezing. I can imagine. I like it though. It's better. It's better to be freezing than sweltering like the rest of the office. It's comfortable. It's true. Today's fact is about sommeliers. So, wine experts.

To become a master sommelier, you have to pass an incredibly difficult exam. Have you guys heard about this? I mean, it makes sense. I have. I actually saw a whole series on this actually after the minute. So it's fascinating. What was that one? It was ages ago, but I think there's only like 20 master sommeliers around the world, right? It's incredible. They have incredible taste buds.

20 is too low, but there are other... What documentary was this that told you wrong information? But yes, it's a very, very, very small amount of people who actually are able to pass this exam. It's very difficult. It comes in three parts. There's a theory part with questions on the history of wine, vivaculture, a bunch of other things. There's a tasting part. There's a blind tasting of six wines in 25 minutes where you have to accurately identify...

grape variety, region, country and vintage. And then service is the third part. You have to serve wine and also recommend pairings and some other things as well. The test has a pass rate of three to eight percent.

of those who take it. So you have to be good enough to even take the thing with most candidates taking between five to 10 years of intense study and mentorship before they even attempt it. There are, there have only been, I should say, since the test began in 1969, there have only been 279 master sommeliers in the world.

I was way off, but still really low. That's still an extremely small number. Oscar's Eye, there's just three. But that would mean that since the test started, worldwide, there have been only five people who have become Master Sommelier each year, which is shocking. I want to see a documentary on the people that failed the test and then what they do with their lives.

I think that's also imagine applying your imagine applying yourself to things that are not you know not like wine you know maybe I don't know PhD in something but no no all the respect in the world to them incredible I think reality TV is what you're looking for I'm looking for people's lives to implode anyway today's real topic the most interesting way people spend time with media and how it is changing

So, our forecasting team just put together some updated numbers on where people spend their time with media, TV, digital, radio, print, a bunch of places. And Ethan, who writes the reports for that team, put together some research on some of the most interesting findings.

from those numbers. I thought it'd be good to put together a consensus list of the three most interesting ways people spend time with media and how it is changing. Oscar and Ethan are going to try and convince myself and you, the listeners, that their reasons should be on the consensus list. Three spots open. Oscar, your first headline for how time spent with media is changing.

So the main one for me, very high level, is over the last 10 years, we've seen digital time spent with digital media double, exactly double. So from four hours and 18 minutes a day on average to eight hours and 36 minutes a day. So incredible leap of, you know, about over four hours a day in just a decade. Mm hmm.

This one, I think, is really a really good one because a lot of times we look back pre-pandemic to today. We look at what happened last year versus this year, what's going to be happening next year or the next year after that. But it's rare that we look back as far as you have here, even an Oscar citing this storyline, which is adults,

spending their time with digital media is doubled in the last 10 years and gone from the four hours 20 ish to eight hours 40 ish. And that is remarkable to think that we were only spending about four hours with me with digital media back then and how it's changed so much. So I don't to be honest, I don't see anything knocking this one off the top spot.

I mean, first of all, the idea of narrowing down this incredible report to just the top three is mission impossible. It's not fair. More than the total number of Somalias in the world is how many incredibly interesting insights are in this report. Oscar might win with that first one. But I should also mention the eight and a half hours in digital is still only two thirds of the total top line is like 12.45 per day because there's all that time with traditional

And it's slowed down, but it is still growing. It's slightly growing. I mean, we keep saying that, but it's definitely, we're not losing any time here. So it's still slightly growing. Okay. 1244. 1244 total if you can count. One third of that is traditional, two thirds digital. And the traditional declines every year, but the digital goes up every year to the point that the top line number still grows by a minute or two every year, which is wild at that scale. Okay.

But if you had to guess, you know, four years out, I mean, this forecast, I think it's just a year or two out, right? It doesn't... We did two years out, yep. Two years out, okay. Unlike our others, a lot of the other ones stretched to four years out. If you had to go to four years out, do you think...

That it eventually hits that ceiling or do we think a minute or two? This is a good question Marcus because we were actually my disagree a bit on we didn't bring this up. We didn't plan this folks. Go ahead Well, you know my thinking is that really I think it's gonna it's gonna keep increasing a lot of it to do with just

You think of Gen Alpha, Gen Z as they're aging into their devices and they're just setting the trend for what connectivity looks like and media consumption. And to me, we keep seeing more multitasking too. So what we call here second screening. People are using three screens, four screens. So to clarify, we would count that...

It's just added up together. So meaning that, you know, that's why you see these incredibly high numbers. And it's because, you know, we're counting one hour on TV and one hour on smartphone as two hours total. So that's my thing. Doing it at the same time. At the same time. Yeah. Yeah. OK. All right. And Ethan, the argument. So I made the point in the report that I thought that we are getting close to zero growth.

status quo, which is a sea change psychologically for all the device makers and all the entertainment platforms and all the social media folks out there because they're used to this ever increasing amount of time that everyone is willing to use their eyeballs staring at their products or their services. And I'm saying that's going to end

I had said that's going to end. There's going to be no more growth, which is going to make the competition all the more fierce. It sort of changes the outlook for everyone. But Oscar kind of talked me into it a little bit, not just for the reasons that he said, but also just the innovation in devices and the likelihood of sort of ever more screens in different places. So it's not just about maybe we are maxing out on

and how much time we're willing to look at the things that already exist, but new things that don't exist yet are gonna come around and that's gonna just start to add to the numbers. Even as traditional just goes further and further and further down, digital might continue to go more and more up. 'Cause it's things we can't even imagine yet. So he might be right about this one. - We'll see, Dan will tell. - Good arguments. We've got our number one for the moment. Adults doubled their time with digital media in the past 10 years.

Ethan, what do you want to try and add to this list? So I was going to bring it down back to the current moment in time. So, you know, Oscar gives us the context, this like this massive expansion of time spent with digital. But what about right now? What's actually still changing? Because not much is right. That growth at the top line is slow. Growth all over the place is slow. So how do we how to if you're listening to me and you're like, OK, so where where are people actually spending more time? And there's a real

real easy answer people are spending more time with media uh and with the activities that are primarily associated with ctv so you can narrow it straight on down like that so think about your subscription over the top streaming services like netflix and disney plus and hulu and amazon etc think about other things that you do with a ctv nowadays people watch youtube you

YouTube also time spent growing significantly. Free ad supported streaming television, aka fast, that's something that is mostly done on CTV. Time spent with that is growing pretty rapidly. - That's like the Roku channel, BlutoTV, things like that. - Roku, Tubi, things like that. And then the regular streamers where these are the categories where you actually get significant year on year percentage growth in time spent.

And that's just about it. There's like nothing else that's really growing. So things like social media, obviously traditional media, we've mentioned gone down, digital audio, lots of other stuff, flat or even declining. But if you're looking for growth, it's things that you would associate with CTV. They're not only on CTV, right? But they're primarily on CTV. Okay. And there's a milestone here, right? CTV...

Yeah, if I say that, I'm jumping on one of Oscar's points. Yeah, I'm happy to take that one. He stole that from me. Oh, is that going to be Oscar's one? Take it from me. It's absolutely fine. It's a competition. No, it's a team effort, Marcus. That's not what the people do. They never listen to when I give them a show.

Well, listen, it segues beautifully into my next one. And it's really a fascinating one. It's that for the first time, CTV time will surpass linear TV time, which is, you know, cable, satellite, you know, TV time.

and that'll be this year. It'll surpass it by six minutes a day. Huge milestone. I mean, we've looked at what TV was in its heyday. I mean, our numbers don't go as far back as, you know, the 90s or early 2000s, but...

Time spent with TV was you know over four hours and a half a day is what people were Spending on their television and so that's very much dropped over the years a lot of it because of what we've just you know Ethan just mentioned the streaming platforms and video in different shapes and forms and so for the first time ever again that CTV numbers are passing linear TV time Which is which is incredible and it's not creeping past it right if you look at the axes It's basically looking like an X

next. Yeah. Yeah. It's one, one up into the right, one down to the, um, and to the right. Exactly. Um, just five years ago, the gap was, uh, I believe about two hours. Um, you know, so this was like pure pandemic time. So yeah, as you mentioned, it's, it's coming on, it's came on very quickly and, and,

you know, into the future, the gap will only widen. We saw this coming for a while, right? Anyone listening to this might even be surprised to find out that TV had not yet fallen below digital CTV entertainment because for so long TV has been plummeting and for so long CTV digital has been rising like gangbusters, but they hadn't actually crossed yet. And this year they will. And so this is... So what's mainly behind... I mean, Ethan, you mentioned a bunch of...

that we group together into CTV? I mean, we break them out, but for this purpose, we're grouping them under the umbrella of CTV. You mentioned YouTube, you mentioned a subscription OTT, you mentioned the fast services. What's driving the CTV the most?

Well, subscription OTT, your Netflixes, et cetera, would account for by far the largest bulk of that time that is spent. But because it is so big and so successful, right, that's old news. The growth is not that high. Growth is still pretty good. The highest growth is actually on the fast-

that works now. They're starting from a lower base, but people are really flocking to that. It's free, no surprises there. And then YouTube is of course free also. And we've been monitoring the slow but steady transition of YouTube from being a primarily mobile device

to being now heavily CTV, majority CTV. - And when we include YouTube TV, we're including anything live, any live content shorts, right? So it would make sense. I mean, zooming out a bit, it's the content, right? It's consumer behavior. I mean, it's the cord cutters, the cord nevers, like that shift away. And so people are filling in that time with CTV. - Right, it's a pretty direct correlation.

But this TV/CTV thing is pretty, it correlates pretty directly, right? People are cutting the cord. They're not watching cable. They're not watching broadcast. They're not watching satellite. They're cutting the cord. And those minutes are just switching right on over. They're staying on the big screen in the living room when you're on the couch. And now it's going to these various digital options. There's just like a whole bunch of different types of digital options. So it's not all just going to one thing. So it's bifurcating a little bit. But in general, we're still sort of sitting there.

I also, looking back about four years ago, if we recall the streaming wars, you know, and that's really helped boost CTV time. And that's what we've tracked, right? Where it was previously kind of like a Netflix or nothing story. Right. There's so many apps. There's so many. And they really, it's just been additive. I mean, people are just, you know, subscribing to more, using more. So, yeah, pretty incredible numbers.

Yeah, so we have this chart here that folks that are watching on video can take a look at right now, which sort of demonstrates a little bit what we've been dancing around. So you will see on this chart that TV is still in first place, but that's because of what I just said, where the transition away from TV to CTV goes to a whole bunch of different categories.

So digital is all split up in a bunch of different ways. And you see sub OTT, if you're looking at the chart now, you see sub OTT is the biggest digital category. But you see a bunch of categories on there that if you collectively added up everything in red, it would be way, way, way, way, way higher than TV or way higher than traditional media all put together. But those minutes do go to sort of different places. Not all of which are CTV related. You see social network time is real high on that list.

Traditional TV is alive and well. CTV may have overtaken it, but I mean, as you can see here, as Ethan just explained, Americans spending more time with traditional TV than any other media line item, so to speak. And then on top of that, I thought this was fascinating from the report. Traditional TV accounts for nearly 40%, close to, of

all TV and video time. So that includes, like we said, sub OTT, social video, YouTube, fast, linear, all the rest of it. It still accounts for nearly 40%. It's going down, but that's still such a sizable piece. And it's number one, when you divide things up by activity,

Yeah. We divide things up by device, which is where you see mobile way out in front and you see the CTV device collectively sort of way out there now. But when you think about the individual activities, that's TV's advantages. It's just the only thing you can do with a TV is like watch TV, right? So you're watching cable, you're watching satellite, you're watching broadcast. That's all one number. And then when you get over in the digital side, there's a whole bunch of different ways we split it up. So that's how TV can sort of remain in number one in some of these various categories, even though

when compared against digital overall, it's way behind. And it's still content driven, right? We think of like news consumption or sports and all of those things are still tailored toward that TV time, family time, their time and place for it. And that's why you see it up there. All right. So we've got adults doubling their time in digital media in the past ten years. That's number one so far. CTV finally surpassing traditional TV.

second place. I could potentially go first. We'll see. We've got one more spot on the list. Uh, Ethan. All right. So, uh,

We also have a brand new debut set of data points in this report, which I'm going to take this opportunity to promote because I do think it also qualifies as being super interesting. We got YouTube by age. This is not any kind of information we've had before. So how much time spent per day by...

all Americans across all the different age groups. I can't describe all of that data for you. That's a whole bunch of different stuff. But the headline, the unsurprising headline is that 18 to 34 year olds spend the most time per day with YouTube, over an hour per day.

Perhaps no surprise there because that cohort of people spend the most time with media in general across a lot of different types of categories. But here is what I thought was really interesting. Older age groups actually spend a lot of time on YouTube. They actually spend more time on YouTube than kids and teens do. And older age groups are growing their time with YouTube the fastest.

YouTube has really become, probably already is the sort of most universally popular platform out there. We can't compare it across everything yet because we don't have this level of granularity for everything. But among the things that we do have granularity for, I mean, everybody watches YouTube. All the different age groups have big numbers. When you say older, what are you talking here? 55 to 64 and then 65 plus.

are wow okay yeah so you're not talking about you know like people who are now 30. you're talking about 55 year olds and above uh watching more youtube than people who are 18 and below correct unequivocally all those all those different we've got age 0 to 11 we've got age 12 to 17 and we've got 55 to 64 65 plus the older ones

spend more time per day already watching YouTube, and they are growing their daily time spent with YouTube more quickly than younger generations are. So there's a sort of a shift in the weight

of who's on YouTube. Again, that those middle, those middle young, younger and middle aged cohorts still spend by far the most at 18 to 34. Actually, really even 18 to 54. They all kind of spent a lot of time on YouTube. But the older the older age groups are coming on strong and it's just a change in behavior. Right. I mean, these are also folks that are slowly bailing on traditional TV or just discovering coming around to digital aging into, you know, folks that have been digital for decades anyway. And

And YouTube really is sort of the universal platform. It serves so many use cases. I mean, it's replacing the linear TV, the cable and the satellite, the shorts type content is competing with social platforms. We've heard about podcasting on YouTube. I'm sure many people have. And so there's, you know, and that's just for...

watching but listening, so it has everything and it's doing really well. - It's quite the Swiss Army knife, yeah. I mean people are watching full movies on there, they're watching clips on there, they're watching podcasts on there, they're watching tutorials on there, there's kind of every type of content seems to fit.

well into the YouTube mold. Okay, so we've got over 55s. I put it number one. I think it's fascinating. Over 55s watching more YouTube than under 18s, number one. I've moved CTV passing traditional TV to number two. And I think adults doubling their time with digital media in the past 10 years goes to...

Oscar, I think you've got one final swing to try to get something on the list. And I'm excited to hear that. The YouTube new numbers, super excited. Please click around and check those out if you go on the platform. ProPlus subscribers, aimafter.com. Please do. So, I mean, the last one really for me is, you know, we're talking a lot about devices, but a really interesting data point was that mobile's share of time

And we're just looking within digital. So mobile share of digital time dropped under 50%. And the last time, and that's this year, the last time this happened was 13 years ago. This was in 2012.

And just to put it into context, in 2012, desktop and laptop time was over 50% of digital time. So this is way before CTV was that relevant, right? We were spending a ton of time on our laptops and desktops. And so, you know, it's pretty significant. And again, you know, it speaks to the story we keep repeating, CTV, CTV. Yeah.

But it's also, you know, digital, like Ethan mentioned earlier, it's digital screens everywhere, right? We're talking about smartwatches, smart speakers, the connected car. So that's another reason why mobile is fallen under. Mobile is still very important, but it's kind of, it's interesting to think of it from a time spent perspective. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, the fact that it's dropped. So it's dropped just under. Just under 50. We consider this a pivot point because it's also dropping, continuing to drop. But if you think about it psychologically or just the way that we think about our media ecosystem, it's just been so mobile-centric recently.

It's smartphones. Everything is about optimizing for mobile. Everything is about optimizing for smartphones. And there was a reason for that. They were totally and utterly dominant for more than 10 years. Well over 50% of all the time you spend with any kind of digital anything is in your hand. And suddenly it isn't anymore.

It's still number one, but it's not over 50% anymore. And that's, again, it's a CTV story primarily. We are shifting our time back in front of gigantic screens sitting on the couch. Everything is still growing. It's not like our time spent with mobile is declining. It's still going up. It's growing. It's just the share is declining because our time with the bigger screens is surging much more and then other new devices. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead.

Really quickly, by declining, do we mean like in two years it will be from 48%, say, to 47% or is it really dropping?

No, more like what you just said. Yeah, 48. It's slowly dropping. Okay. Sorry, Oscar. Yeah, I was just going to add. It's also what I mentioned earlier, the second screen story, right? The multitasking. So for marketers, it's telling them that people are spending more time with their attention on other screens while they're on the mobile devices. That's really what that number is saying as well.

So, you know, a little harder to reach the consumer because their attention is divided. Yeah. Yeah. This one's a good one. And we should say as well, mobile, huge portion is just under half. Then you've got CTV, 30 odd percent, 30ish. Yeah, 30. Yeah.

- And then, so that still leaves a lot of room for the laptop, the desktop, the computer, which is still close to an hour, about an hour. And then you mentioned, Oscar, a bunch of the other connected devices, and that is getting close to about an hour of total time. So some other places people are spending their time. This one's a good one. All right, that leaves our final consensus list with, in first place, over 55s watching more YouTube than under 18 year olds.

Second is mobile dropping below 50% in terms of the time spent on that device versus all devices. And then in third place, CTV will finally surpass traditional TV. And yeah, I think that context one's really good. The doubling of time in over the last 10 years is remarkable.

not good enough to make the top three. Ethan's full report with all the numbers that you could possibly hope for is called the US time spent with media 2025 mid-year update. And that comes out on June 25th. So pro subscribers head to emarketer.com and check that out when that drops. But that's what we have time for for today's episode. Thank you so much to my guests for hanging out with me today. Thank you first to Oscar. Thanks for having me, Marcus. Let's do this again soon.

Yes, please. He's been on recently, okay, everyone? Just have to remind them, you know? Thank you to Ethan. I'm going to go defrost. Yeah, thanks for having me. Oh my gosh, the drama. What is happening? It's not that bad, okay? Icicles on his face. Thank you so much to the whole editing crew, of course, and to everyone for listening into Behind the Numbers, an e-marketing video podcast made possible by Synth.

Subscribe, follow and leave a review if you can. We'll be back Monday talking about some very specific but highly unlikely predictions for 2025. Happiest of weekends.