That’s the welcome news from PQ Media, which has released its Global Consumer Media Usage Forecast 2023-2027 report.
One key takeaway: Television (including live, digital, streaming and Over-the-Top video) remains the most used of the 11 media platforms that PQ Media tracks around the world.
Among the other main findings from the latest PQ Media study, global consumer media usage, including all digital and traditional media channels, grew at an accelerated rate of 2.7% to an average of 55.81 hours per week (HPW) in 2022.
Faster growth in 2022 followed a sharp deceleration in time spent with media growth to 1.7% in 2021. But this followed the fastest increase in media consumption in 15 years in 2020, with a pandemic-fueled surge of 3.3%, PQ Media notes.
Meanwhile, the average global consumer spent 7.97 hours per day with media in 2022, up from 7.14 hours in 2017. In some markets like Japan, daily media usage exceeded 12 hours per day. The U.S. ranked No. 4.
How does digital media stack up across the globe compared to linear channels? PQ Media, helmed by Patrick Quinn, finds that consumers spending 35.3% of their time with digital media in 2022, up from 25.5% share in 2017. In four markets, like South Korea, digital usage exceeded 50% in 2022.
Additionally, ad-supported media accounted for 53.7% of time spent in 2022, down from a 58.5% share in 2017, with global consumer-driven media usage to exceed 50% for the first time in 2027.
In the U.S., this reflection point was reached in 2018.
“As early as 2018, we began to see trends emerging that portended a looming saturation point, at which time the device purchase, data plan fees, content usage trends, longer upgrade cycles, etc., baked into our forecasts for several years were now coalescing into strong secular shift, and our econometric intelligence is currently indicating market conditions, growth opportunities and headwinds, key economic variables, among other data, we’re now very close to what PQ Media projected three years ago,” said Quinn. “In that the macroeconomic trends further support that this key market driver has reached
fruition.”
Among the anchors slowing down media consumption is a drop in digital device shipments, leading to mobile media consumption rising at a mere single-digit rate in 2023 – the first time this has ever happened.”
