Growth In Time Spent with Media Is Slowing

Thanks to media multitasking, US adults will squeeze an average of 12 hours, 5 minutes per day of media usage into their waking hours this year—nearly an hour more than the average in 2011. But the daily figure is now rising slowly and is expected to grow by just 3 minutes between 2016 and 2018.

eMarketer reports while mobile devices enable people to consume media content anywhere at any time, the numbers suggest a saturation point is near—and that increased time spent with one medium will tend to come at the expense of time spent with another, as explored in a new eMarketer report, “US Time Spent with Media: eMarketer’s Updated Estimates for Spring 2016.”

Nondigital TV, despite a downward trajectory, remains the single largest part of US adults’ media day. TV time far exceeds time spent on any one component of the overall “digital” category. While digital video is on the upswing, the sum of mobile viewing and desktop/laptop viewing will be less than one-fourth the amount of time spent on nondigital TV this year, eMarketer predicts. (Note, though, that 14 of the 26 minutes per day spent with "other connected devices" in 2016 will go to digital video, as when a consumer uses a Roku device or a smart TV to access digital video content like a program on Netflix.)

It is a sign of digital video’s strength that it is the one desktop/laptop element that will grow rather than shrink through most of the forecast period. Even after an expected retreat of a minute per day of time spent in 2018, desktop/laptop video time spent will still be above the 2012 figure, at 24 minutes vs. 20 minutes. Over the same period, mobile video will add a daily 25 minutes of usage, going from 9 minutes to 34 minutes.

Even in a category as robust as digital video, though, growth has slowed and is expected to slow even more. Mobile video was one of the media posting a triple-digit increase in time spent in 2012 (218.0%) as smartphones and tablets became common household appliances. This year, by contrast, the increase will just barely make double digits (10.0%) before falling below that level in 2017 (8.5%) and 2018 (7.2%).