U.S. Consumer Time Spent with Media Fell for First Time In 2023

• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, Yesterday

The good news -- or bad news, depending on how you look at it -- is that consumer time spent with media continues to expand. The really bad news for the ad industry is that ad-supported media's share continues to decline, in both the U.S. and worldwide.

Those are among the findings in the 2024 edition of an annual Global Consumer Media Usage Forecast released this morning by PQ Media.

While total weekly time spent with media actually declined 0.4% to 76.69 hours in the U.S., and inched up only 0.3% to 56.15 hours worldwide, PQ forecasts it will rebound again this year and continue expanding for the foreseeable future.

“[Media consumption] will post accelerated growth in 2024 with general elections in the United States, Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, India and South Africa, as well as the Summer Olympics in Paris, that will drive media usage rates in most of Western Europe that are in the same time zone or within an hour,” says PQ Media CEO Patrick Quinn. “In 2026, we’ll see this same phenomenon in the Americas when the United States, Mexico and Canada tri-host the FIFA World Cup and, again, in 2028 when the Summer Olympics are held in Los Angeles.”

In terms of ad-supported media's share of time spent, the U.S. reached the tipping point in 2015, when consumer-supported media became the dominant sources for American consumers.

For the global consumer media marketplace, ad-supported media will continue to have the dominant share through 2028, but it also is on a trajectory to tip sometime shortly after that.