The last months have been utterly frantic for me, which is why I’m sending out my Wednesday post for paid subscribers on a Friday! I’ve got another couple of mad weeks until the end of June, including speaking at Sunny Side of the Doc in La Rochelle (come and say hi if you are there!), and then hopefully things will calm down, before the summer break.
This post has sat in my drafts for a couple of months, where each time I saw an interesting nugget of data, I would add it, to be able to hopefully create a more joined up picture of landscape as it is at the moment. It covers all sorts, some recent, others from a few months ago:
Understanding how overall time spent with media has changed, and what might come next
Have we reached saturation point of media consumption hours, and have we past the peak of popularity of certain platforms or media types
How big reach numbers aren’t the same as time spent watching or listening
A report says YouTube’s daily minutes have overtaken Netflix
Global numbers can mask behaviours in individual countries
Video podcasting and the importance of day parts
Not all countries and niches are valued the same by advertisers
Not all media is valued the same either.
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There have been all sorts of data points and comments of late, which have made their way into many of the seminars or keynotes I’ve done recently, but haven’t appeared here. And so, to that end, here is a few of them - some connected, others not, but all hopefully help encourage an understanding of the highly nuanced market we existing in.
As a reminder, if this newsletter has an overall mission it is outlined here:
In summary, we need to move beyond hype as quickly as we can and instead treat all the players in our converged market as normal businesses, which will help no end in making informed decisions about the future:
Tech companies often have similar journeys; starting in their early days and years which are characterised by a frenzy of hype, mania and unicorn evaluations. This is then followed by a process of de-hyping, which then can lead to a company being seen at some point as a ‘normal’ business, when the usual rules apply without rose-coloured glasses.
Or in short, it is the Kipling line ‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…’.
Anyway - this post is an attempt to give a rundown of all the moving parts at play - and why their individual and collective volatility makes predictions and planning so tricky.
This is something that often can be taken for granted or missed in reporting of audience share of media consumption. So to pick on one example - Nielsen’s The Gauge graph shows percentage of audience share with various media types and platforms. So when we talk about share, we often are talking about the share of the overall piece of pie. (PS, The Gauge still hasn’t been updated for either April or May, for those following the story).
However, these types of graphs don’t reflect that the time spent overall with media has gone up massively. Below is a graph from 2012 which shows global media consumption from 1900 to 2020:
When we think of time spent with a particular type of media or a platform, it is often positioned as ‘instead of’ - so people are listening to podcasts instead of radio, or on demand streaming instead of live TV. However, what has been a crucial trend over the past decades is the level of media encroachment into all aspects of our daily lives, and we need to be attuned to how often media consumption is as well as. So people are watching vertical videos on TikTok as well as live TV, or listening to podcasts as well as going to the cinema, and so on.
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