The first quarter 2018 Nielsen Total Audience Report found that the time spent daily with media exceeds more than 11 hours per day for American adults. Time spent with media includes “listening to, watching, reading or generally interacting.”
The usage, which is termed a “surge” by Nielsen, is being driven by new platforms and younger and multicultural users.
Time Spent Daily with Media
Traditional media platforms are holding steady, Nielsen found. Radio reaches 92% of adults, while live and time-shifted TV reaches 88%, both measured on a weekly basis. The big winner is television. “Overall, live and time-shifted television, even when accounting for seasonal fluctuations in viewership, still accounts for a majority of an adult’s media usage, with four hours and 46 minutes being spent with the platform daily in first-quarter 2018,” according to the press release.
The dynamic is a solid base of traditional services and an aggressive growth in newer platforms. Nielsen sys that TV-connected devices such as video games consoles and Internet-connected platforms — Google Chromecast, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV and others — enable use of the Internet and access to “a treasure trove of content” that drives usage numbers up.
From the fourth quarter of last year until the first quarter of 2018, the amount of time spent on these devices daily increased from 35 minutes to 40 minutes. Fourteen minutes of those minutes are on game consoles and 26 on Internet-connected devices.
Computers, smartphones, tablets and similar devices played a role. In the first quarter of 2018, consumers spent three hours and 48 minutes daily on this equipment, a 13-minute increase from the previous quarter. Nielsen attributed 62% of this to smartphone usage.
The age breakdown is stark. “Though older generations generally spend the most time with media (adults 35-49 spend over 11 hours a day on it, while adults 50-64 do so at a nearly 13-hour clip), younger generations are at the forefront of TV-connected device and digital usage. Radio is uniquely immune to having age as a factor. It consistently accounts for between 14%-17% of daily media use.”
The study found differences in use by race and ethnicity and pointed to its importance. “With the race/ethnic landscape of the U.S. rapidly changing, multicultural consumers are driving the changes in the media landscape as well, with younger generations being more diverse than those of their parents and grandparents.”