NEW YORK—The IAB has released new data showing record breaking levels of digital advertising, with particularly rapid growth in social media and digital video advertising in 2025.

The newly released 2025 Internet Advertising Revenue Report, conducted by PwC, shows that despite concerns about economic and geopolitical uncertainty, the industry drove record revenue, reaching $294.6 billion in 2025, reflecting a 13.9% year-over-year increase.

These results were particularly notable given that 2025 lacked major cyclical events such as the Olympics, FIFA World Cup, or elections, which historically drive increased ad spending across digital media.

“This revenue growth reflects a market that has reoriented around performance channels. As expectations for measurable outcomes rise, investment is concentrating in areas that can directly correlate spend to business results,” said David Cohen, CEO, IAB. “At the same time, artificial intelligence is rapidly moving from theory into practice, emerging as a meaningful driver of efficiency and effectiveness across the ecosystem.”

Growth by ad category included social media advertising ($117.7 billion, up 32.6%), digital video (78.0 billion up 32.6%), commerce media ($63.4 billion, up 18%), search ($114.2 billion, up 11%), podcast ($2.9 billion up 17.6%) display ($81.6 billion, up 9.8%).

The report noted that consumer behavior is continuing to shift toward video, creator-led content, and performance-driven environments, which is turn is reshaping where and how ad dollars are spent.

Video (including CTV, social video, online video, and short-form video) grew 25.4% YoY, to a total of $78 billion in revenue. Compared to a year ago (19.2%), this shows that video is still capturing a growing share of incremental digital advertising revenue relative to other formats.

Social media ad revenues in 2025 reached $117.7 billion, showing significant 32.6% YoY growth, or an increase of $29 billion. Growth is being driven by the scaling of the creator economy, deeper commerce integration, and continued performance improvements in targeting, measurement, and attribution.

Programmatic advertising rose 20.5% YoY to $162.4 billion, gaining $27.6 billion in new spend as automated buying scales and lays the groundwork for agentic AI-driven media buying.

Commerce media grew 18.0% YoY to $63.4 billion, reinforcing its role as a core performance channel powered by first-party data.

Those same usage patterns continue to drive consolidation, with the top 10 global media companies continue to hold the majority of internet advertising revenue share.

“While overall revenue is stronger than ever, consumer usage patterns have changed materially over the last year,” said Jack Koch, senior vice president Research & Insights at IAB. “The ability to integrate data, media, and commerce is becoming a defining advantage: companies that can provide seamless, personalized, and commerce-enabled experiences are where the attention and investment are moving.”

The report also stressed that the ad market is being transformed by three major structural shift.

For starters, AI is becoming advertising’s infrastructure layer. It is redefining discovery, creative production, execution, and monetization. Specifically, it will mean deeper first-party data, integrated commerce ecosystems, proprietary measurement infrastructure, and the ability to offer end-to-end buying. AI is redefining the entire value chain, including agent buying and selling, creative production, AI-driven commerce to both humans and agents, and more.

Search is still important, but growth is slowing. Search revenues (including AI search) continue to hold the largest share of revenue dollars, reaching $114.2 billion in 2025. While search grew 11% YoY, its growth rate slowed considerably vs. 2024 (15.9%).

Creator advertising is now a core media channel, leveraging always-on strategies. Creator advertising spend reached $37 billion in 2025. Creator is growing faster than the broader advertising market, with spending projected to reach $44 billion in 2026. Brands are embedding creators into long-term media strategies, operational workflows, and even product development. What was once campaign-based influencer marketing is evolving into always-on creator programs, with brands building dedicated teams and tools to manage the partnerships at scale.

“The lesson of our 30-year history is that measurement, standards, and interoperability — as mundane as those things can sometimes sound — are what got this industry from zero to just shy of $300 billion,” added Cohen. “And with the disruption and opportunity that AI is bringing into the ecosystem, there is still lots of vital work ahead.”

The “IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report: Full Year 2025” is available here.

Experts from IAB, PwC, and Madison & Wall will discuss key findings and trends from the report during a webinar on April 21 at 1 pm ET. Register here.

AWS has launched a new service that uses artificial intelligence to convert video into vertical formats optimized for mobile and social platforms in real time.

The company is touting its new AWS Elemental Inference, as a tool that will help broadcasters and streamers reach audiences on social and mobile platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts without manual post-production work or AI expertise.

Although today’s viewers consume content differently than they did even a few years ago, most live broadcasts are still produced in landscape format for traditional viewing. Converting these broadcasts into vertical formats for mobile platforms typically requires time-consuming manual editing that causes broadcasters to miss viral moments and lose audiences to mobile-first destinations, according to AWS.

AWS Elemental Inference uses an agentic AI application by analyzing video in real time and automatically applies the right optimizations at the right moments. Detection of vertical video cropping and clip generation happens independently, executing multistep transformations that require no human intervention to extract value.

AWS Elemental Inference analyzes video and automatically applies AI capabilities with no human-in-the-loop prompting required. IT applies AI capabilities in parallel with live video, achieving 6-10 second latency compared to minutes for traditional post-processing approaches. This “process once, optimize everywhere” method runs multiple AI features simultaneously on the same video stream, eliminating the need to reprocess content for each capability.

The service integrates seamlessly with AWS Elemental MediaLive, so AI features can be enabled without modifying existing video architecture. AWS Elemental Inference uses fully managed foundation models (FMs) that are automatically updated and optimized, so no dedicated AI teams or specialized expertise are needed.

Regina Rossi, head of product for AWS Media Services explained how development of the tool was driven in large part by live sports and the importance of using metadata in the conversion process.

“One of the things we’ve been hearing from our customers is that they need help when it comes to understanding the context of what's happening in their video—in particular, live sports which is their most valuable content,” Rossi said. "So we wanted to provide them with the appropriate metadata that gives them the ability to transform their video in a way that's meaningful.

“They want to meet their viewers where they are more and by that I mean, a lot more of their viewers were watching content on mobile phones as an example,” she added. “And for them to be able to be formatted for that mobile native viewer, they had to convert their horizontal video into vertical video. And so what we wanted to be able to do was actually use the right set of x, y coordinates, and be able to create things like a saliency map so that the focus of that video is going to be in that vertical frame.

“So when you're watching it on a phone, it actually moves with the action, so you're not missing out on what's happening in a scene.”

One of AWS’s earliest customers, Fox Sports Digital, reinforced how important vertical video is to the network, Rossi said, adding that “90% of their content is actually consumed vertically.”

Rossi emphasized that unlike earlier efforts in this space, AWS Elemental’s AI architecture is not just about “following the ball” during live play. The company has tested the technology on a variety of sports and found that a lot of them actually lend itself well to a vertical format, according to Rossi.

“Ones that might be harder are things like tennis, where you have a ball that's traveling really fast between opposite sides of the court. But even then, one of the things that we do is we make adjustments to some of the foundation models that we use,” she said. “So as an example, we're not doing just object tracking. We're not just following a ball back and forth. What we're doing is actually creating a saliency map, so understanding where the action is happening in a scene, and so we're able to then follow the action, not just the ball.”

Key Features at Launch

• Vertical video creation – AI-powered cropping intelligently transforms landscape broadcasts into vertical formats (9:16 aspect ratio) optimized for social and mobile platforms. The service tracks subjects and keeps key action visible, maintaining broadcast quality while automatically reformatting content for mobile viewing.
• Clip generation with advanced metadata analysis – Automatically detects and extracts clips from live content highlights for real-time distribution. For live broadcasts, this means identifying game-winning plays, touchdowns, and emotional peaks with precise start and end points—reducing manual editing from hours to minutes.

Now Available
AWS Elemental Inference is available today in 4 AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai). AWS Elemental Inference can be activated through the AWS Elemental MediaLive console or integrate it into workflows using the APIs.

Customers pay only for the features used and video processed, with no upfront costs or commitments, meaning that customers can scale during peak events and optimize costs during quieter periods. More features and capabilities will be introduced throughout this year, including tighter integration with core Elemental services and features to help customers monetize their video content better.

Big Blue Marble has been named as Launch Partner with AWS Elemental Inference integrated into Big Blue Marble’s cloud-native Cloud Video Kit platform

The company will demo AWS Elemental Inference at its Booth (W1701) in the West Hall during the 2026 NAB Show, April 18-22 in Las Vegas.

To learn more about AWS Elemental Inference, visit the AWS Elemental Inference product pag

PORTSMOUTH, NH—Video content created for social media video platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram is having an increasing influence on viewer habits and redefining the concept of TV viewing, according to a new report from Hub.

YouTube has topped Nielsen’s TV viewing charts since 2024, as creators secure high-profile studio deals that rival—and often surpass—those of traditional producers. Streamers are inking major video podcast deals, and the buzz on 3-minute microdramas may finally deliver where Quibi fell short.

Hub Entertainment Research's latest "Video Redefined" study confirms that, beyond traditional TV and movies, the definition of what comprises "watching TV" is broader than ever.

Fielded in December 2025, key findings include:

• Since 2022, weekly TV and movie viewing is down by two hours, while social/creator viewing has held steady. Weekly TV & movie viewing has declined from 21 to 19 hours per week, while viewing of social/creator video viewing has remained steady at about 11 hours per week.
• Viewing of social/creator video is growing stronger among older viewers over 35. Older viewers 35+ are continuing to increase how much they watch social/creator videos, an opportunity to deliver even more to satisfy that growing audience.
• Watching short YouTube videos on the big TV is just as much fun as watching longer TV shows & movies, especially for younger Gen Z viewers 13-34. Well over half of Gen Z viewers embrace YouTube viewing on the TV, compared to less than 4 in 10 viewers age 35+.
• But guilt is often a by-product of social video viewing: more than half of young viewers think they spend too much time watching social. Marketers can both lean into supporting the perceived "vice" of social video or use it as opportunity to remind viewers of the redeeming qualities that longer-form content provides.
• Microdramas may have broken the curse of Quibi: More than one in five (22%) viewers say they have watched these mini (1-3 minute) dramatic stories that play out over multiple episodes. They love how easy they are to watch and the dramatic and suspenseful stories they deliver.
• Still, social platforms remain central to how viewers discover longer-form TV and movies, especially for younger viewers. Well over half of viewers age 13-34 say they discover new TV shows and movies from clips they see on places like TikTok and Instagram.

"Viewers embrace how easy and fun it is to watch social and creator videos at YouTube, Tik Tok and Instagram," says Jason Platt Zolov, study author and Senior Consultant at Hub. "As this content continues to migrate from mobile phones to living room TV sets, there's great opportunity to develop even more compelling creator programming - as well as unique ways to promote traditional TV and movies via those social platforms."

These findings come from Hub’s annual “Video Redefined” report, based on a survey conducted among 1,896 US consumers ages 13-74. Interviews were completed in December 2025. A free excerpt of the findings is available on Hub’s website. This report is part of the “Hub Reports” syndicated report series.

A new survey from Horowitz Research shows how rapidly consumers are embracing shoppable media and the growing importance of social media purchasing decisions, with findings that nearly half of consumers have purchased a product through a social media platform in the past month and data showing that half of consumers say that social media has become a primary way to learn about new brands and products.

“Shoppable media is changing the game for everyone within the media ecosystem, creating new ways to increase consumer engagement with advertising, shortening the marketing funnel by driving product discovery and conversion in one experience, and providing media and tech companies with the opportunity to monetize additional revenue streams ” notes Adriana Waterston, executive vice president and insights & strategy lead for Horowitz Research, a division of M/A/R/C Research. “The opportunities presented by shoppable media can already be evidenced in the social space. We are excited to see how the CTV shoppable media space will evolve in the next year as more brands lean into shoppable advertising.”

The research highlights how shoppable media has evolved into a dynamic ecosystem that spans social media, connected TV, and the gaming environment that continue to draw advertising and marketing dollars away from traditional TV advertising.

According to Horowitz Research’s latest annual report, "State of Media, Entertainment and Tech: Advertising in a Digital World 2025", today’s consumers encounter shoppable touchpoints across multiple channels, from scanning QR codes during streamed content to interacting with shoppable posts and video on social apps to making-in-app purchases while gaming. As this ecosystem grows, social media in particular plays a leading role, with platforms like TikTok Shop, Instagram Shopping, and YouTube Shopping making it easier than ever for consumers to discover products and make in-app purchases.

More specifically, the study found that nearly half (45%) of consumers have purchased a product through a social media platform in the past month, with TikTok Shop leading the way. Convenience and product discovery are driving the social media shopping trend. In fact, half of consumers (50%) agree that social media has become a primary way to learn about new brands and products.

The study also reveals that 23% of consumers aged 18 and older have clicked on a brand ad in their social media feed or homepage, and 13% have purchased products from an influencer’s social media page.

Adoption is highest among women aged 18-34 and Latinx consumers, with Latinx shoppers more likely to purchase through TikTok Shop compared to their white, Black, and Asian counterparts. Among social media shoppers, 71% reported placing one to four orders in the past month, while 23% placed five or more orders.

Beyond social media, connected TV is also becoming a powerful shoppable media channel, the researchers reported.

Viewers are increasingly engaging in interactive ads that feature scannable QR codes, allowing them to learn more about a product or make a purchase directly from the TV screen. Fifteen percent of consumers scanned a QR code that appeared on their TV screen while watching content in the past month, and 10% say that QR codes that pop up while watching TV inviting them to learn more about a product are the most effective way to reach them.

ion about the State of Media, Entertainment & Tech: Advertising in a Digital World 2025 report, is available here.

A new survey from S&P Global Market Intelligence Kagan highlights how important social media is for younger consumers, with Gen Z spending 5.1 hours a day on social media in the first quarter, up from 4.5 hours in Q1, 2023.

The data also showed the ongoing generational divide in social media usage, with Gen Zers spending nearly twice as much time on social media as millennials, and three times that of Gen Xers and baby boomers or seniors.

While social media use rose among Gen Z adults between Q1 2023 and Q3 2025, it declined among all other age groups surveyed.

Other key findings include:

• Facebook and Instagram were the top two U.S. social media platforms. With the exception of TikTok, most Americans surveyed tend to spend less than one hour per day on a specific social media platform. Americans on average currently use 2.6 social media platforms, a decline from 3.2 in early 2023.
• Approximately three-quarters (73%) of Gen Z adults and more than half (52%) of millennials said they strongly or somewhat agree that they receive better TV and movie recommendations from social media than from online video services, compared to much smaller shares of older respondents.
• Nearly two-thirds (62%) of Gen Z adults reported that they strongly agree or somewhat agree with the statement “I have purchased items/merchandise directly from a social media platform (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok),” while approximately half (47%) of millennials had the same response, compared to 31% of Gen Xers and only 21% of baby boomers or seniors.

While some analysts have questioned the ongoing economic viability of broacast-TV late night shows amid ongoing declines in linear viewing, new data from Tubular Labs suggests that these shows are still thriving on social media and that their future may lie in adopting a “social media-first” strategy.

Tubular reported that since the start of 2025, late-night broadcast shows like “Saturday Night Live,“ “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” “Late Night With Seth Meyers” and “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” have combined for more than 17 billion views across social video platforms. Fifty-six different videos from late-night TV had at least 25 million views.

Declines in late night TV audiences has been cited as a major factor in the cancellation of CBS’s “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” after published reports citing anonymous sources claimed the show was losing $40 million or more a year.

Tubular’s data seems to offer a counter-narrative to that view. It shows audiences are gravitating towards on-demand monologues and viral segments they can consume and share on their own time, instead of staying up late to watch live.

Of the most-watched social videos from these shows, Tubular reported, several were uploaded in October, including this Jimmy Fallon clip that racked up 51.6 million views on TikTok in just a few days after its release.

"SNL", despite questions of relevance over the last decade as streaming comedy grows, accounts for 14 videos of 25 million-plus views on its own. That included the top late-night video of the year: a skit featuring Pete Davidson and Timothée Chalamet that racked up over 63 million views, the researchers reported.

That might indicate these shows should be adopting a social-media first strategy for their future, given that these videos have massive reach, and even better opportunities for audience targeting than traditional TV, Tubular Labs reported.

The researchers also stressed that when “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” returned to the air in September, much was made about its TV ratings. Yet, as YouTube itself pointed out in the immediate aftermath, the bigger number was actually around Kimmel’s return monologue video on the platform. That clip has 22.7 million views, and is Kimmel’s most-seen video of 2025.

LONDON—As Hollywood jumps into the production of mini-dramas, a new study from Ampere Analysis finds that more than one in 10 internet users have watched drama episodes lasting 10 minutes or less on social media.

The firm’s annual global survey of over 100,000 consumers shows ‘micro-dramas’ and ‘mini-dramas’ gaining traction on social media, with YouTube and TikTok the leading destinations. As younger audiences spend more time with vertical short-form video on their phone, commissioners are using social platforms as distribution channels and as discovery funnels for premium apps such as DramaBox and ReelShorts.

Minal Modha, research director and head of sports media, sponsorship and consumer research at Ampere Analysis, explained that “Shorter scripted drama platforms are capitalizing on the increasing use of vertical videos customized for phone viewing, particularly among younger audiences. On average, internet users spend nearly 50 mins a day watching videos on social media, rising to over an hour for 18–34-year-olds. Thus, commissioners of mini- and micro-dramas can use social platforms in two main ways: first, show all episodes on services like YouTube and generate advertising revenue, or second, tease the content on TikTok or Instagram, before enticing audiences onto subscription apps such as DramaBox.”

Other key findings include:

• Younger skew. Viewers aged 18–34 are 21% more likely than the average viewer to have watched mini-dramas in the past month.
• APAC leads; Europe lags. Engagement is strongest in Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines—reflecting mobile-first usage in these markets. In comparison, audiences in Europe are less likely than average to have watched in the past month.
• YouTube is the most popular destination for viewers, with 44% of those who have watched a mini-drama doing so on the platform.
• TikTok follows close behind at 38%.
• Top genres. Romance, Anime and Fantasy are the biggest draws and should be priority genres for future commissions.

NEW YORK, N.Y.—DoubleVerify (DV) has announced the launch of DV Authentic Attention for Social. The product will first launch with Snap, the owner of Snapchat.

The new solution marks an expansion of DV’s attention measurement capabilities from the open web and CTV into social media for a more complete view of cross-platform effectiveness.

“Snap’s immersive, high-impact environment makes it an ideal platform to demonstrate how attention can drive better outcomes across social environments,” said Mark Zagorski, CEO of DoubleVerify. “This will give advertisers further visibility into how users engage with their campaigns, transforming how performance is measured and empowering smarter, more impactful media investment decisions.”

The new offering combines DV’s scalable ad exposure data, including key metrics such as viewable time and screen share, with eyes-on-screen ad signals from Lumen Research. The two companies said this created the most holistic attention solution available for advertisers seeking to measure their performance on Snapchat at scale.

This is also the first solution on Snapchat to combine impression-level ad exposure metrics with eyes-on-screen data, delivering an unprecedented level of attention insight across their platform.

More specifically, the solution enables advertisers to assess media performance on Snapchat with greater precision, helping inform budget decisions, validate campaign impact, and drive stronger ROI. As part of that, DV Authentic Attention offers three main metrics:

• Ad Focus – Evaluates the ad's ability to capture eye gaze, helping marketers understand the likelihood of an ad reaching users.
• Dwell Time – Measures how long an ad holds a user’s attention, quantifying in seconds the focus each ad receives to inform creative optimization.
• Attention Index – Offers an overall measure of attention on Snap and enables advertisers to benchmark their results against peer performance within their vertical.

By measuring at the impression level, DV captures granular data that reveals the specific drivers of attention within each campaign, which powers insights that surpass the aggregated reporting used by other attention offerings on Social. For Snap advertisers, this enables a deeper understanding of how creative, placements, and activation strategies ultimately impact user attention.

DV Authentic Attention is a key component of DV's Media AdVantage Platform, which combines media verification, ad optimization, and campaign outcomes measurement to maximize media performance and ROAS. As part of media verification, DV Authentic Attention helps advertisers understand how effectively their ads capture attention and drive user engagement––data signals that are correlated with campaign performance.

With this release, DV and Snap said that they are expanding their joint measurement capabilities, building on DV’s existing fraud, brand suitability, and viewability measurement on Snapchat, while bringing DV’s attention measurement capabilities to Social for the first time, alongside coverage on the open web and CTV.

DV Authentic Attention for Social is now globally available on Snapchat, with additional platform integrations coming throughout 2025.

To learn more, visit www.doubleverify.com.

NEW YORK—While live sports continues to be a mainstay of TV programming and a reliable producer of large audiences, a new survey from consumer research platform Attest indicates that live TV viewing continues to fall out of favor with consumers, particularly younger viewers.

Attest’s sixth annual “U.S. Media Consumption Report,” which covers how Americans consume television, audio, news and social media, found the share of consumers watching three or more hours of TV of any type per day stands at 56% in 2025, down from 61% last year and 63% the year before. The most committed TV watchers are those aged 50 to 67, (66% of whom watch at least three hours a day).

Live TV bore the brunt of the showdown. Slightly less than three in ten consumers (28%) of consumers said they generally don't watch any live TV on an average day (up from 24% last year and 20% in 2023), with even high percentages avoiding live TV among younger viewers.

A hefty 41% of under-30s reported that they typically don’t watch live TV (versus 27% of 31-49s and 20% of over-50s). Under-30s who do watch live TV are most likely to say they watch it for between 30 minutes to one hour per day.

The survey also found that viewing times for streaming services have also decreased, with a 4 percentage-point decline in people watching for three or more hours, and a corresponding increase in those streaming in one- to two-hour viewing sessions.

A third of consumers now stream TV for one to two hours per day, the researchers said. People under the age of 30 watch the most, with one quarter typically viewing programming on a streaming TV platform for one to two hours a day and another quarter chalking up three to four hours per day.

The survey also provided some specific data on individual streamers. After suffering a 9-point decline in regular viewers last year, according to Attest’s data, Netflix has only managed to regain a couple of percentage points. Overall, about 64% of consumers say they watch Netflix at least once a week.

The research found that Prime Video and Disney+ have enjoyed the most growth, both increasing weekly viewers by four percentage points. Sitting at 49%, Prime Video now enjoys its highest percentage of weekly viewers since Attest has been measuring this data point, while Disney+ is yet to surpass its 2023 peak of 38% (currently at 35%).

Other TV streamers remain more or less static, aside from Max, which has recorded a 4 percentage point loss to 25%. This compounds the previous year’s loss, when viewership fell from 33% to 29%. Apple TV+, meanwhile, continues to struggle to secure any meaningful U.S. market share, watched weekly by just 12%.

Looking at the viewing profile of different streamers, 18-to-30-year-olds are the top viewers of Netflix (77%), Hulu (57%) and Disney+ (46%). Consumers aged 31 to 49 dominate Prime Video (55.5%), Paramount+ (31%), YouTube TV (19%) and Apple TV+ (13.5%). Meanwhile, Peacock, Apple TV+ and Sling have a fairly even age distribution, the study found.

In terms of digital news, young Americans are accessing digital content less regularly: 41% of the 18-30 demo now views digital news at least once a week (a decline of 7 percentage points from last year), while 20% read digital magazine content weekly.

The over-50s are the biggest consumers of digital news, with 66% accessing it weekly, an increase of 6 percentage points. This age group is also more likely to be viewing digital magazine content than previously (weekly viewing is up four percentage points to 20%), but it’s 31-to-49-year-olds who read the most: 27% access it at least once a week.

Men are also more likely to access both news (60% vs. 54% for women), and magazine content (27% vs. 20% of women) on a weekly basis.

While the survey once again documented the ongoing decline of traditional media like TV, radio and newspapers, it also found declines in social media usage, particularly in the over-30 demo and among heavy social media users who spend more than three hours a day with the platforms.

The percentage of consumers spending three plus hours on social media per day has decreased by 6.5 percentage points to 30%. The decline comes primarily from Americans aged 31 to 49, who have cut back on three-hour-plus sessions for a second year running (down by 10 percentage points to 27%). This age group has significantly slashed long scrolling sessions since 2023, when 45% spent more than three hours on social per day. Now, they’re most likely to say they spend one to two hours online per day.

Consumers under 30s have also reduced the amount of time they spend online, recording a seven percentage point drive in sessions over three hours since last year. However, a sizable 46% still spend long durations on social platforms each day. Looking at just how much time 18 to 30s spend scrolling, Attest sees 21% spend three to four hours, 16% spend five to six hours and an addicted 9% spend more than six hours a day.

Older Americans (aged 50-67) typically spend up to an hour on social media each day, and only 21% spend more than three hours. When it comes to the biggest doomscrollers, women are three times more likely than men to spend six or more hours a day on social platforms (10% versus 3%). Interestingly, consumers with a lower household income are also notably more likely to indulge in long social sessions than higher earners (33% versus 22% spend over three hours a day).

All the social media platforms in Attest’s survey failed to chalk up growth in daily users over the last year—with TikTok being the singular exception. TikTok has increased daily users by 5 percentage points to 30%. Meanwhile, X and Facebook have both suffered small losses: daily usage of X has fallen by 4 percentage points to 16%, and by three percentage points to 52% for Facebook.

This move puts Facebook on a par with YouTube for daily users. But when Attest combines daily users with people who visit at least three times a week, the data finds that YouTube is striding ahead as the nation's most popular platform (71% versus Facebook’s 65%).

Looking at movement in the use of social platforms by different demographics, the data sees 18-to-30-year-olds are responsible for TikTok’s growth, with a 12 percentage-point increase in daily users among this age group (to 53%). This makes TikTok as popular as Instagram for the under 30s. BeReal, on the other hand, has fallen off the radar with only 2% of under-30s using it daily, and 82% never using it.

YouTube is celebrating its 20th birthday with stats showing how popular the platform has become and by announcing some new features, including the ability for users to create their own multiviewers.

As it marked its 20th anniversary, CNBC cited data from Moffett Nathanson that YouTube could be worth as much as $550 billion as a standalone company and that it’s on track to become the biggest media company by revenue in 2025, surpassing The Walt Disney Co. for the first time.

Separate Nielsen data shows YouTube’s content accounted for 12% of overall TV viewing in March. That was the second consecutive month for YouTube as the top reported media distributor, eclipsing its previous company best share of TV of 11.6%, Nielsen said.

The first YouTube video was uploaded on April 23, 2005, by co-founder Jawed Karim. The 19 second clip, “Me at the Zoo,” shows Karim at the San Diego Zoo. It has since racked up more 355 million views and 17 million likes.

Fittingly for its 20th birthday, YouTube reported that on average, there are over 20 million videos uploaded to the site daily. It also noted that YouTube isn’t the only one celebrating a birthday this year. Both YouTube Music and YouTube Kids are turning 10.

In terms of stats to mark the occasion, the platform reported that in 2024, YouTube users averaged over 100 million comments on videos on a daily basis and that creators hearted comments from an average of 10 million viewers every day. Last year, on average, YouTube videos received over 3.5 billion likes from users per day.

For the occasion, YouTube also announced a number of improvements to the user experience.

In the next few weeks, YouTube TV members can experiment with building their own multiview with select non-sports content, starting with a small group of popular channels and expanding in the coming months.

Last year, a small group of creators gained access to the ability to voice-reply to comments on their videos. YouTube reported that it will be expanding that feature in 2024.

In addition, users can now create your very own personalized radio station with Ask Music. Ask Music is available on iOS and Android for all YouTube Premium and YouTube Music users.

Beyond that, 4 times playback speed is rolling out on YouTube Premium, and a number of other features will be arriving this summer that will provide easier navigation, playback, quality tweaks, plus streamlined access to comments, channel information and subscribing, the company reported.

More information is available here.

Broadcast and cable TV news outlets saw strong social media growth in March, according to new data from the social video analytics company Tubular Labs .

Fox News, for example, grew its U.S. unique viewers across Facebook and YouTube by 32% month-over-month, to 60.1 million, while minutes watched soared 26% to 1.6 billion (both 13-month highs).

CBS News saw a 51% bounce in unique viewers to 38.5 million and a 29% increase in minutes watched to 140.4 million in March, Tubular reported.

The growth comes amid a busy news cycle in March, with major news involving policy changes, tariffs and economic concerns.

CNN in March saw unique viewers grow by 21% to 31 million, while minutes watched grew 80% month over month to 426.3 million.

MSNBC had 35.2 million unique viewers, up 20% from a month earlier in March, but its minutes view hit 1.4 billion, up 28% month over month, according to Tubular. That made it the only one of the news organizations to come close to Fox News in minutes viewed.

ABC News had the second highest unique viewers, with 54 million, but the slowest growth, up 5% month over month in March. Its minutes viewed only grew 1% in March to 346.5 million.

More information about Tubular can be found here.

In the film “The Matrix,” the character Neo is given the choice of taking the blue pill or the red pill. If he swallows the blue pill, the perception of life as it is goes on unaltered. If he takes the red pill, though, the veneer of security is ripped away and the reality of life is revealed. TV decision-makers are facing a blue pill, red pill moment.

If planners take the red pill, they’ll enter a world where watching TV is a niche activity among Gen Z, while TikTok and YouTube has become their TV. MrBeast is bigger than any streamed or cable soap or drama—much bigger.

Did Gen Z ever really fall in love with broadcast and cable TV? The body of evidence suggests it didn’t. Almost two years ago, research by Hub found 13-to-24-year-olds spend just 17% of their time viewing TV shows compared to those 35 years or older, who spend 43% of their total screen time watching TV. It found the older demographic spent about a fifth of their time gaming or looking at “nonpremium” videos on social platforms, while 13-to-24-year-olds spent twice as much time gaming and watching videos on platforms like YouTube.

Now it is YouTube, not Netflix or any other streaming service, that wins more TV viewing across all age groups. According to recent Nielsen viewing data, YouTube accounts for more than 10% of all adult viewing in the United States. All broadcast accounts for 22.6%, all cable 26.1%, all streaming is 41% (of which Netflix is the nearest single challenger with 7.9%) while Prime Video and Disney+ trail with 3.6% and 2.5%, respectively.

Data published by Hub in September showed that two-thirds of viewers turn to an online source for watching TV first. Only 26% of viewers say they default to an MVPD set-top box for viewing.

We’re due another detailed breakdown of Gen Z’s TV consumption patterns soon and you can expect the divergence in TV viewing styles to continue. However, we can already see that 60% of Gen Z viewers watch SVOD on a regular basis, compared to 13.3% for cable and 8.6% for broadcast, and they could switch in numbers to AVOD alternatives as subscription costs mount up.

This pattern of change is more or less an international phenomenon. In the United Kingdom, for example, the media regulator Ofcom’s latest viewing analysis for 2024 reported less than half of 16-to-24-year-olds watch broadcast TV in a typical week.

And yet, when it comes to the TV advertising business, the industry acts as if nothing has happened. I’d argue it is time to change how we think about TV in two ways.

Firstly, isn’t it time to recognize that as far as Gen Z, and to a larger degree millennials, are concerned, YouTube and similar platforms are TV? The fact that it mixes social content with TV and film production is surely irrelevant. Vested interest in the production world—which, of course, means TV channel brands—may attempt to promote a form of prejudice against user-generated and influencer-created video, but ultimately the audience will decide. And market power is shifting to younger viewers.

Influencers that produce some of the most entertaining content on video social platforms would argue that their TV product is as valid as any TV drama. And their production values are rising. But TV brands are increasingly using VSPs as a gateway to their product.

Social media’s hold over Gen Z’s attention directly influences what TV they do watch. According to a recent study by CableTV.com, 95% of Gen Z viewers age 18-24 decide whether they are going to watch a show on TV based on what they’ve seen on social media.

In the US, eMarketer estimates that more than half YouTube viewing is done via a CTV device and this could hit 60% by next year. A similar pattern is emerging in the U.K., with 34% of YouTube’s viewing inside homes during 2023 happening on a TV, up from 29% in 2022.

So, shouldn’t we all accept that the audience has decided that YouTube is TV?

Secondly, planners need to swallow that red pill and enter an AV planning matrix in which every 10-year age bracket is plotted by different AV tech and format consumption habits, cross-referenced by interest or behavior group segments and shopping data, as well as people’s relationship with advertising on different AV technologies.

Major sporting events are likely to remain an exception to the new matrix planning rules, which would likely generally identify broadcast TV as an older segment buy and YouTube and TikTok as primary Gen Z and Millennial buys with AVOD providing a more nuanced audience mix.

But watching TV is also an increasingly complex pursuit. Research by Hub shows more that 50% of Americans subscribe to more than three TV streaming services. Major sporting events such as NFL games are becoming spread across a selection of platforms—Nielsen credits Thursday Night Football for a 12% bump in Amazon Prime Video viewership in September.

Planning TV across the multiple formats and platforms is now byzantine in nature, but although the 20th century model still dominates and skews planner’s thinking about the audience, change is coming fast. Statista predicts OTT will be worth $193.6 billion in the U.S. in 2029, compared to $130.5 billion for “traditional TV and home video”.

A fresh way of thinking about how audiences consider TV as an experience both in terms of content and delivery technology is overdue. Let’s enter the matrix.

New survey data from the Pew Research Center shows that a significant majority of Americans (58%) continue to prefer to get news on digital devices versus only 32% preferring TV. 

The new data on Pew’s "News Platform Fact Sheet", shows, however, a slight rebound in preferences for TV news. 

About 33% of those surveyed in 2024 said they often got their news from TV with another 31% saying they sometimes turned to TV for news. That represented a slight improvement over 2023, when 32% said they often got news from TV and 30% said they sometimes got news from TV. 

About 57% said they often got their news on digital devices while 29% said they sometimes did. 

News websites or apps and search engines are the most common source of news, Pew reported. About two thirds (66%) often or sometimes got their news from news websites or apps while 65% got their news from search engines. More than half (54%) at least sometimes get news from social media, and 27% say the same about podcasts.

Overall, at 86% got their news often or sometimes from digital devices, versus 63% for TV, 42% for radio and only 26% often or sometimes from newspapers. 

The 2024 data is from a survey of U.S. adults conducted July 15-Aug. 4, 2024.

More data and charts are available here. 

SAN DIEGO—Verance, a global watermarking company that powers AI provenance and broadband features for broadcast television, is launching a new solution based on open watermarking standards that will help companies combat misinformation and and AI-generated disinformation.

The solution enables social media platforms to authenticate broadcast content in user uploads, enhancing public trust in media and reducing the societal risks of disinformation. It uses Verance Aspect to enable broadcast content to be reliably authenticated by social media platforms, devices and disinformation analysts.

"These tools we are providing to enable reliable authentication of broadcast news content through open standards like ATSC watermarking and C2PA provenance are essential,” explained Nil Shah, CEO of Verance. “They represent a significant step toward maintaining public trust and ensuring the integrity of the information that shapes our world in this contentious election year and beyond."

The technology stems from fully open watermarking standards developed and published by the U.S.‑based broadcast standards organization ATSC and the provenance authentication technology standards consortium C2PA. Each standards organization has broad participation across the global media, technology and consumer electronics sectors.

Using these industry standards, broadcast adopters of Verance Aspect can enable recipients of their content to determine whether it has been modified, as well as to locate an authentic version of the published asset. This validation step, which can be fully automated, allows the recipient to determine whether the media seen misrepresents what was originally broadcast, Verance reported.

Major broadcasters across the U.S., including Graham Media Group, Gray Television, Sinclair Broadcast Group and Capitol Broadcasting Company have already deployed ATSC watermarking using Verance Aspect. ATSC watermarking has also been incorporated into the DVB and HbbTV interactive television specifications, which are used in dozens of countries across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Pacific Islands.

Additionally, C2PA is beginning to be adopted as a means of authenticating content on social media platforms, with LinkedIn and TikTok having recently announced plans to use it to authenticate media uploaded by users.

Verance Aspect employs ATSC watermarking to access C2PA manifest services for broadcast content. C2PA authentication requires signed metadata that cannot be transmitted through existing content distribution paths. ATSC watermarking enables recipients of broadcast content to locate the absent C2PA metadata by embedding imperceptible URLs throughout the broadcast audio and video that survives any distribution path.

The ATSC watermark standards have supported metadata-driven solutions like C2PA since their inception in 2017. The recent release of C2PA specifications (v2.1) introduces support for watermark-based recovery of C2PA metadata and identifies ATSC watermarking as a compatible technology.

This standards-based approach enables broadcasters and platforms to create interoperable implementations of the underlying technologies, encouraging global cooperation on addressing disinformation challenges accelerated by rapid deployment of powerful generative AI systems.

A number of broadcasters applauded the initiative. "Concern about deep fakes in the media is a growing concern for the public and political leaders,” said Anne Schelle, managing director of Pearl TV. “Good news: the broadcast industry proactively addressed this issue years ago and it’s being implemented now. The NextGen TV ecosystem provides consumers with security assurance for over-the-air television broadcasts. Extending that assurance to social media and web browsing using ATSC watermarking and C2PA provenance is an essential next step to maintain consumer trust in broadcast news."

"At Gray, we believe in the power of trustworthy journalism,” David Burke, senior vice president and CTO of Gray Television, added. “By integrating Verance Aspect watermarking with C2PA standards, we're not just protecting our content; we're reinforcing the credibility of broadcast news in an age where AI-driven misinformation is a significant threat. This technology is an important part of ensuring the public receives verified, unaltered information."

"As AI continues to evolve, so too must our strategies for safeguarding the truth. This collaboration is significant as the industry battles against disinformation," said Christina Hartman, vice president and head of Scripps News for the E.W. Scripps Company. Scripps works with Verance through its relationship with Pearl.

Mike Kralec, senior vice president and CTO for Sinclair, said, "Ensuring our viewers have the highest confidence in our programming is critical to our business. We believe C2PA, through its ability to authenticate the name of content creators or distribution services, can play a central role in future end-to-end technical architectures and workflows. We applaud C2PA and Verance for recognizing that authentication of creators and distributors is absolutely essential to the advanced workflows our industry will rely on in the future."

"We are pleased to have the opportunity to cooperate with C2PA and our membership on extending the use of ATSC standards to ensure that broadcast content can be presented to viewers with an assurance of authenticity," added ATSC president Madeleine Noland.

LOS ANGELES & BELLEVUE, Wash.—The TV measurement company iSpot has announced an integration with TikTok that will provide brands with a deeper understanding of how the audience reach of TikTok compares to American Linear TV viewers.

The solution is now widely available to marketers via iSpot’s Unified Measurement Platform, which verifies and measures TV advertising across hundreds of streaming platforms, apps, services, and traditional linear networks, iSpot reported. 

In announcing the integration, iSpot also released some new data from the solution. It said that on average, 58% of TikTok impressions reached a unique audience of viewers who were unexposed to the TV portion of the campaign—demonstrating the efficiency of TikTok campaigns in driving new audiences to advertisers’ linear TV campaigns.

“In the dynamic video landscape, brands need to extend their reach beyond traditional channels. TikTok’s commitment to providing diverse measurement tools enables advertisers to understand and leverage cross-media engagement, driving meaningful results.” said Jorge Ruiz, global head of marketing science, TikTok

Specifically, through this partnership and integration, TikTok advertisers can now leverage iSpot’s Unified Measurement solution to quantify the ad impressions delivered to incremental households not reached on linear TV or streaming sources and obtain person-level audience estimates to account for mobile viewing behaviors.

iSpot said the integration gives advertisers the ability to:

• Understand their TikTok campaign performance with Unified Measurement standard KPIs
• Determine the reach and value of TikTok through brand-level reporting
• Optimize media plans and buys across CTV and linear with incremental reach of TikTok ads

“Marketers and brands that aren’t considering TikTok as integral to their cross-platform marketing campaigns are clearly missing out on an opportunity to extend their reach and drive results,” said Stu Schwartzapfel, executive vice president of media partnerships at iSpot.tv. “We’re thrilled TikTok leaned into our leading Unified Measurement to uncover, understand and ultimately capitalize on consumers who are not reached by linear TV.”

NEW YORK—At the midseason mark, Major League Soccer is reporting record highs in traffic and engagement on its social media and digital platforms.

Engagement on League and Club social channels are at an all-time high and have received over 400M social interactions in 2024 to date, a +230% rise vs. last season. 

In addition the league reported that traffic on the league's website is up +102% year-to-date over 2023. This includes the highest single-day traffic in MLSsoccer.com's history when the Inter Miami vs. El Salvador preseason match was streamed live on the site on Jan 19.

The league also reported these record breaking stats:  

• 3X Increase in Video Views: @MLS' video content continues to increase in popularity, collecting 1 billion video views in 2024 thus far, three times more than the same time last year.
• Fastest Growing Social Following: MLS' social following has grown at a higher rate in 2024 than any other major men's North American sports leagues on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube:
• TikTok: +566K added followers in 2024 (+17% since start of season)
• YouTube: +180K added followers in 2024 (+14% since start of season)
• Instagram: +328K added followers in 2024 (+8% since start of season)
• Inter Miami Leads the Way in Social Engagement: Inter Miami has become the most followed North American sports team on TikTok (8.9M followers) and the 3rd most followed on Instagram (17.1M followers). 

In addition the league also reported midseason records for attendance, sponsorship revenue, & retail sales.

Major League Soccer's All-Star takes place July 24 when the MLS All-Stars take on the LIGA MX All-Stars at Lower.com Field in Columbus Ohio. The second edition of Leagues Cup kicks off July 26 with every MLS and LIGA MAX club competing in the month-long tournament. The MLS All-Star Game and Leagues Cup are available on MLS Season Pass on the Apple TV app on Apple devices, smart TVs, streaming devices, set-top boxes, and game consoles, and the web at tv.apple.com. 

BRISTOL, Conn.—According to recently released Comscore data, ESPN Digital had 124.3 million unique visitors in November of 2023, reaching 54% of the U.S. sports category.

The data also showed that ESPN remained #1, marking its 21st consecutive month in the top spot. 

ESPN also reported that the ESPN App also remained No. 1 among mobile sports apps in the U.S., with 29.4 million unique users.

In addition, the ESPN Fantasy App was No. 2 in the mobile sports category and No. 1 among fantasy and sports betting apps, reaching 11.6 million unique users.

ESPN Social accounts topped all sports properties in November for the 29th consecutive month, with 684 million total actions.

SAN FRANCISCO—New data from Tubular Labs shows that minutes watched of content from U.S. news organizations on social media increased dramatically, with NBC News seeing a 53% increase in minutes to 1 billion in October. 

Meanwhile Fox News was up 45% in minutes watched to 674 million and CBS News increased minutes watched on social media by 37% to 165 million minutes.

Tubular also found that as interest in the news category spiked last month, minutes-watched increased far more than unique viewership. This could indicate that U.S. news audiences on social video are a more static group whose watch-time ebbs and flows based on current events, the researchers said. 

Fox News and MSNBC were the only major TV news networks to gain unique U.S. viewers, up by 34% and 23% respectively in October.

Despite the viewership fluctuations, most outlets saw a significant increase in minutes watched, attributed to extensive coverage of the Gaza conflict, early 2024 presidential election news, and U.S. Speaker of the House votes. 

SAN DIEGO—With concerns running high about deepfakes misleading voters during the upcoming election season, Verance has unveiled a watermarking system for digital authentication and tracking of trusted news sources of video.

The company’s watermarking system comes as concern grows among the public about the impact of deepfakes on the election. An Axios-Morning Consult poll conducted in August found more than half of Americans expect misinformation spread by AI to impact who wins.

Major news organizations are taking steps to bolster their vigilance against deepfakes. For instance, CBS News has recently launched a new fact-checking unit for AI to combat misinformation from deepfakes.

Verance currently is conducting advanced talks with TV and digital news operations and consumer electronics giants about creating partnerships for the trusted news source watermarking system. The watermarks embedded in video content would be detected by receivers in the home, enabling viewers to decide about the authenticity and accuracy of information, the company said.

The system will give viewers the ability to determine if the media they are watching has been tampered with or modified during distribution. It also equips them with access to fact-checking sources, the company said.

The watermarking system will be available to political campaigns, government and corporations as well. Working with manufacturers of TVs and other consumer devices, these entities can protect viewers from deepfakes and other misinformation, it said.

“It is important to enlarge the body of authenticated news content to reduce the influence of content that could be fake, especially in a hotly contested election year,” said Verance CEO Nil Shah.

“Without universally trusted authenticity tools in this new era, the internet’s societal benefit as a means of accessing knowledge will precipitously decline. This presents a serious problem not only for large technology platforms such as Facebook and YouTube but also traditional news media that increasingly rely on the internet for sourcing and verification.”

The system is in line with an Executive Order President Joseph Biden released Oct. 30 that builds on voluntary commitments already made by technology companies, the company said.

The order requires industry to develop safety and security standards before AI products can be introduced to the public and gives federal agencies a to-do list to oversee AI deployment. It directs the Department of Commerce to issue guidance to label and watermark AI-generated content to help differentiate between authentic interaction and those generated by software.

Deadlines set out in the order range from 90 to 365 days for implementation. First up are safety and security items.

More information is available on the company’s website.

 New data from Tubular Labs shows that in August of 2023, Tegna’s unique U.S. viewers grew by 43% month-over-month across Facebook and YouTube, partly due to an emphasis on crime-related content, the researcher said. 

Tubular Audience Ratings also indicated that the summer surge took Tegna up to No. 9 among all U.S. media and entertainment properties, shy of Warner Music at No. 8.

Tegna also saw U.S. minutes watched climb significantly month-over-month, increasing 62% across Facebook and YouTube. 

At 291.2 million minutes watched, that put the company ahead of Nexstar and MLB for the month, according to Tubular Labs.

MUMBAI, India—As the NBA 2023-2024 season gets set to start in October, the league, which has made international expansion a key priority, has issued data showing that NBA games attracted record numbers of viewers in India during the 2022-2023 season. 

The NBA said that 2022-23 NBA season was the league's most-watched ever in India, surpassing 100 million unique viewers across linear, social media and digital media platforms for the first time ever. 

The 2023-24 NBA regular season action starts on Wednesday, October 25 and games will air live in India on Sports18-1, JioCinema and NBA League Pass via the NBA App.

"Surpassing the milestone of 100 million unique viewers last season is a testament to the growing interest in basketball here in India. Our strong distribution network and local language commentary on the platform has expanded the league's audience in the country, especially within the Hindi-speaking markets," said NBA India global partnerships & media business head Sunny Malik. "As we gear up for the 2023-24 season, we look forward to building on this momentum by providing fans in India with new and exciting ways to experience the NBA, including digital innovations and customized content on the devices and platforms they use the most."

The NBA also reported these stats from the 2022-23 NBA season in India: 

• Viewership of NBA games on digital platforms grew 12x from the 2021-22 season. 
• Overall linear and digital watch time of NBA games and programming grew by 50 percent compared to the 2021-22 season.
• Fifty-three percent of viewers were 30 years-old and younger, while 45 percent of all viewers were female. 
• Hindi commentary was available for 112 games throughout the season, contributing to an overall reach of 33 million viewers.
• The NBA introduced a youth-focused educational broadcast series on Nickelodeon Sonic featuring local cartoon characters Happy & Pinaki to further engage with Indian children and teach them the fundamentals of the game. The series reached 11 million viewers.
• More than 3.8 million fans follow the NBA's localized social media channels in India, registering a 2.6x increase in followers added this season as compared to 2021-2022.
• NBA's localized social media channels in India generated 1.3 billion video views, up 209 percent from the 2021-22 season, and 968 million engagements, registering an increase of 200 percent from last season.
• The NBA released 10 locally-produced content series in India that generated 182 million views across the league's social media channels, including This is Basketball starring NBA Brand Ambassador for India Ranveer Singh, which showcases the diversity of the basketball community in India; All The Way Up, a series with leading hip-hop artists that explores the convergence between hip-hop and basketball; The NBA India Weekly Show, centered around all things NBA and basketball in India; and The Real Talk, a video series featuring players, legends and other special guests.
• The NBA's user-generated content initiative #MadeInBallywood generated 42 million views on social media and received more than 50 entries from aspiring players across the country.

LOS ANGELES—Cineverse has announced a new deal with VA Media that will help expand Cineverse’s channels global footprint on YouTube and other social platforms.

VA Media, a major player in YouTube and social media monetization, had previously managed a number of Cineverse's brands and various titles under a global license. 

The two companies have now extended the deal to include growing audiences for Free Movies from Cineverse, the fast-growing Screambox TV, westerns based Lone Star TV, family and faith favorite Dove TV and comic convention originated Con TV. 

All channels are owned and operated by Cineverse and powered by the company's digital managed service tech Matchpoint to streamline delivery.

"We tailor our content and monetization strategy for each channel uniquely with a mix of compilations, full episodes, and feature films that appeal to each of the respective channels' audiences with a regular cadence of data-driven messaging," said Mark Ashbridge, CEO of VA Media.  "Our renewed and expanded Agreement with Cineverse is ideal for both companies as it provides Cineverse's deep library of relevant content to highly engaged audiences via VA's vast global AVOD network."

"As the FAST and AVOD channel marketplace gets more and more crowded with new offerings, it was critical to our growth to continue working with a proven partner that understands our brands and has figured out how to continue growing incremental audiences on YouTube and across social media," said executive vice president of global partnerships, Marc Rashba.  "We know there are different target audience clusters that may not necessarily be on their couch watching any of our 25+ channels in a traditional manner and this brings the content to where they are and on the devices they use daily."

BALTIMORE—Sinclair, Inc. has named Nickolas James to the newly created position of vice president, Social Media.

In this role James will report to Kevin Cotlove, chief digital officer, and will be instrumental in shaping and executing Sinclair’s growth and engagement strategy for social media and digital content initiatives, the company said. 

An Emmy, Webby, Clio and Muse award-winning digital creator, James joins Sinclair from HBO Max, where he served as Director of Social, leading the creative campaigns for more than 65 Max Original series including And Just Like That and Gossip Girl, while also managing the brand’s audience-focused editorial channels including MaxPop and MaxMade.

“Nick brings a wealth of experience creating audience passion around talent, brands and content,” said Cotlove. “We’re excited to have him help shape the future of our digital storytelling and engagement strategy.”

James began his career as a development executive at E! where he was part of the team responsible for hit series including Keeping Up with The Kardashians, Chelsea Lately, and Fashion Police. He later joined Condé Nast Entertainment, overseeing the development and production of digital video series and franchises, and launched viral sensations including Vogue’s 73 Questions, Glamour’s You Sang My Song, and W’s ASMR Interview.

“I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work with the team at Sinclair to redefine how we create an authentic connection with our audience in social media and evolve our storytelling to produce an array of digital content that celebrates the communities we serve," James said. 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on June 11 that “threads reached 100 million sign ups over the weekend. That's mostly organic demand and we haven't even turned on many promotions yet. Can't believe it's only been 5 days!”

The growth in users is faster than recent notable tech launches like ChatGPS, which took two months to reach the 100 million mark after its debut earlier this year. Prior to the Threads launch, ChatGPS had the fastest app take-up in history. 

As of 12 p.m. on July 11, Quiver Quantitative estimated that there were about 105 million users. 

In addition a growing number of journalists have joined the platform. 

By comparison Twitter has about 353.9 million active users annually and 237.8M active users daily, the Evening Standard reports.

But the platform has been plagued by problems since the $44 billion Elon Musk acquisition that angered users and advertisers. A blog post in May regarding a Pew Research Center survey found that a “majority of Americans who have used Twitter in the past year report taking a break from the platform during that time, and a quarter say they are not likely to use it a year from now.” The Pew Research Center survey was conducted about five months after Musk acquired the site. 

MENLO PARK, Calif.—As expected, Meta has launched a new social media platform called Threads that will directly compete with Twitter. 

The new app, built by the Instagram teams at Meta, allows users to log in using their Instagram account. Posts can be up to 500 characters long and include links, photos, and videos up to 5 minutes in length.

The launch comes at a time when Twitter has been under fire from users, advertisers and regulators for tech outages, unpopular changes in the way the platform works and concerns by advertisers that their marketing campaigns will be associated with misinformation and objectionable content. 

While some have called the new product a Twitter-killer, the launch will, at minimum, will produce the kind of intense competition in the social media space not seen in years. 

Unlike other Twitter-like platforms that have struggled to gain traction, Meta's new Threads platform would complement Meta’s Facebook and Instagram social media platforms and provide Meta with the ability to promote Threads to the billions of accounts currently using Facebook and Instagram.

To capitalize on that, Threads is very closely tied to Instagram. Users must have an Instagram to signup and the Threads user name is their Instagram handle. 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that Threads achieved 10 million signups within seven hours of its launch. 

Meta began exploring the idea of launching a Twitter competitor last fall following problems at Twitter in the wake of Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition. 

Since then other social media platforms competing with Twitter have reported upticks in usage but none have come close to challenging Twitter’s reach of about 450 million users. 

Media researcher and financial analyst Brian Wieser, CFA and founder of Madison and Wall has argued that Meta's market power could allow it to succeed where others have failed.  

“Twitter’s self-imploding antics of the Elon Musk era and the failure of upstarts to capitalize on the situation should mean there is an opportunity for someone to capture significant consumer engagement and advertiser budgets from Twitter,” Wieser noted in a July 5 post. 

“While trust in Meta as a protector of data may be poor and while there are many, many reasons to have antipathy towards the parent company for consumers and advertisers alike, if anyone could take an existing base of producers of content to catalyze usage of such a product, Meta is very well-positioned,” Wieser said. 

One key issue will be addressing advertiser concerns about having their marketing campaigns associated with the objectionable misinformation and racist material that can be found on Twitter. 

If both Twitter under its new CEO Linda Yaccarino and Meta's new Threads platform can overcome those problems, Wieser argues that "this won’t necessarily be a zero-sum game: it’s very possible that a successful Threads could then lead to a vibrant and competitive sector for micro-blogging as a result.”

Others see Threads as a potential Twitter-killer. In an email to TV Tech, Luke Lintz, CEO of the digital marketing and social media company HighKey Enterprises argued that “"In the hyper competitive market of social media, Meta's launch of Threads could be the beginning of the end for Twitter. Not only will the new microblogging platform look and feel nearly identical to Twitter, it will be seamlessly connected to Instagram, which has more than 2.3 billion users and is growing.”

As previously reported, “[t]his could spell bad news for Twitter, which only has 450 million users and has lost more than 32 million users since Elon Musk bought it in 2022,” Lintz argued. “In March, Musk said revenue at Twitter had fallen by 50% over the past two years and it's not clear how it intends to bring those advertisers back.” 

In the announcement launching Threads, Meta said that "Instagram is where billions of people around the world connect over photos and videos. Our vision with Threads is to take what Instagram does best and expand that to text, creating a positive and creative space to express your ideas. Just like on Instagram, with Threads you can follow and connect with friends and creators who share your interests – including the people you follow on Instagram and beyond. And you can use our existing suite of safety and user controls."

As Twitter faces growing complaints from users and advertisers about problems on the social media platform, Meta has decided to jump into the space with a new competitor called Threads. 

Meta hasn't officially announced the product but the app is available for pre-order at the Apple Store, where it is being billed by Meta as a place “where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow. Whatever it is you’re interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favorite creators and others who love the same things — or build a loyal following of your own to share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world.”

The launch would complement Meta’s Facebook and Instagram social media platforms and provide Meta with the ability to promote Threads to the billions of accounts currently using Facebook and Instagram.

Meta began exploring the idea of launching a Twitter competitor last fall following problems at Twitter in the wake of Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition. 

Since then other social media platforms competing with Twitter have reported upticks in usage but none have come close to challenging Twitter’s reach of about 450 million users. 

“Twitter’s self-imploding antics of the Elon Musk era and the failure of upstarts to capitalize on the situation should mean there is an opportunity for someone to capture significant consumer engagement and advertiser budgets from Twitter,” noted the influential media researcher and financial analyst Brian Wieser, CFA and founder of Madison and Wall. “But can Meta do it? I think it’s very plausible.”

“While trust in Meta as a protector of data may be poor and while there are many, many reasons to have antipathy towards the parent company for consumers and advertisers alike, if anyone could take an existing base of producers of content to catalyze usage of such a product, Meta is very well-positioned,” Wieser wrote in a July 5 post, adding that Threads’ chances of success increase if it can offer advertisers a safe platform for their marketing.  “[C]onsumers are more likely to use a platform they trust and advertisers are more likely to worry less about whether their sponsorships will be associated with problematic content.”

Wieser stressed that while Meta’s Threads could capture budgets from Twitter, it is also possible that Twitter’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino could manage to "rebuild Twitter without as much involvement from Musk.  If that were to occur, this won’t necessarily be a zero-sum game: it’s very possible that a successful Threads could then lead to a vibrant and competitive sector for micro-blogging as a result.”

Others see Threads as a potential Twitter-killer. In an email to TV Tech, Luke Lintz, CEO of the digital marketing and social media company HighKey Enterprises argued that “"In the hyper competitive market of social media, Meta's launch of Threads could be the beginning of the end for Twitter. Not only will the new microblogging platform look and feel nearly identical to Twitter, it will be seamlessly connected to Instagram, which has more than 2.3 billion users and is growing.”

“This could spell bad news for Twitter, which only has 450 million users and has lost more than 32 million users since Elon Musk bought it in 2022,” Lintz argued. “In addition to this, the number of active users on Twitter is dropping. A new Pew Research report recently found that the most active Twitter users are posting 25% less per month following the acquisition.”

“If that’s not enough, Threads will also have the upper hand when it comes to content moderation standards, making it more appealing to advertisers who have pulled millions of dollars from Twitter after Musk gutted the firm’s content moderation team,” wrote Lintz. “In March, Musk said revenue at Twitter had fallen by 50% over the past two years and it's not clear how it intends to bring those advertisers back.”

TEL AVIV—Videocites has announced the initial closing of a Series B round led by Velocity Capital Management (“Velocity”) with additional investments by Series A investor Infront Sports & Media AG, and NBA Equity. 

With offices around the globe, including one newly opened in New York, Videocites offers a next-generation solution for analyzing social media that the NBA is now using to provide insights into its global reach and brand exposure across social media content.

While user-generated content (UGC) has a significant influence on a brand's perception and popularity across social media, it’s challenging to identify and categorize at scale, Videocites noted. To address that issue, Videocites has developed an AI-generated identification capabilities and video-fingerprinting technology to recognize and analyze UGC and trademarked assets related to the brand. 

“We’re excited to collaborate with Videocites to better understand how user-generated content resonates with our fans,” said David Lee, head of NBA Equity. “This partnership and our investment in Videocites reflect our commitment to continue to grow and embrace our fans across the ever-evolving global social media landscape.” 

“Aggregating and analyzing real-time UGC and brand video data in one dashboard allows our clients to keep their finger on the pulse of their fanbase and partners,” said Eyal Arad, Videocites’ Co-Founder, and CEO. “It’s no secret that today’s user habits across social media have a significant impact on shaping public perception of any organization. We are turning that ‘perception’ into quantifiable data.”

“We believe that Videocites can become the industry standard for tracking and measuring intellectual property across social media. Videocites’ technology greatly enhances monetization opportunities for rightsholders and creates a platform for streamlined direct-to-consumer engagement,” said Velocity managing partner David Abrams.

Velocity is a sports, media, and entertainment domain-focused private equity firm founded in 2021 by Abrams and Arne Rees.

Videocites will use the funding to grow its global presence and recruit leading sales and business development professionals to expand its unique offerings in the United States and Europe. 

SEATTLE—IMDb and TikTok have announced that they are working together to provide TikTok users with a new feature that will help them share and discover movie and TV content and information.

Using IMDb information on movie and TV content, the new TikTok feature allows users to link to movie and TV titles directly within the videos they create. The link directs people to a dedicated in-app page that showcases a collection of other videos that linked to the same title and highlights essential data about the movie or TV show, provided by IMDb, including top cast members, director, genre, release date, runtime, and user rating. 

Users can also add movies and TV shows to the favorites tab of their profiles, allowing followers to access the titles’ information from IMDb. People can link up to five movies and/or TV show titles in a single video. The feature is currently available to users in the U.S. and the United Kingdom.

“We’re excited to welcome TikTok as the latest major company to rely on IMDb data to power new experiences for their customers,” said Nikki Santoro, chief operating officer of IMDb. “This innovative collaboration enables TikTok creators to showcase and share the movies and shows they love, further extending the IMDb mission to help customers discover and decide what to watch and listen to, wherever they are.”

"TikTok's global community of movie and TV enthusiasts is incredibly active and passionate, with more than 25 billion combined views for the hashtags #FilmTok, #MovieTok, and #TVTok," said Grace Li, director of strategic partnerships at TikTok and ByteDance. "As we continue to find new ways to enrich the TikTok experience, this new feature, developed in collaboration with IMDb, gives our community more opportunities to discover, create, and share the content they love.”

TikTok’s licensing of IMDb data and information is fulfilled through AWS Data Exchange, a service that allows millions of Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers to securely find, subscribe to, and use third-party data in the cloud. 

Essential metadata for every movie, TV, and over-the-top (OTT) series and video game title is available for licensing through IMDb via AWS Data Exchange. The large IMDb database is used by many companies to improve their own customers’ experience, power investment decisions, shape sentiment analysis, inform content acquisition strategies, and much more, AWS reported. 

GLENDALE, Calif.—Loop Media has announced that it is working with TikTok to offer a dedicated TikTok channel on Loop Media’s digital out-of-home service.

TikTok and Loop Media are offering the channel to 12,500 Loop Players and devices across the U.S. that have been deployed in bars, restaurants, retail shops and other outlets. 

The Loop service includes over 200 channels. 

The agreement is part of TikTok’s strategy of becoming more available on connected TVs and other devices. 

“In our continual pursuit to create channels that bring value to businesses of all kinds, our new TikTok channel on Loop TV is the perfect addition to our service,” said Greg Drebin, chief content officer for Loop Media Studios. “TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video and together we have curated a new channel that captures the diversity and popularity of this world-class platform.”

“TikTok has become the platform more than a billion people turn to for entertainment throughout their day. With TikTok’s dedicated channel on Loop TV, that experience can be extended to new screens, venues, and audiences,” said Dan Page, head of global distribution, new screens at TikTok. “We are excited to collaborate with Loop to launch a channel that provides viewers with an experience that’s distinctly TikTok and offers our community more opportunities to spark joy throughout their day.”

SANTA MONICA, Calif.—In a bid to create a new revenue stream, Snapchat has launched a new $3.99 a month subscription service Snapchat+. 

The service has launched in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, with more territories to follow, the company said. 

The company’s stock has lost about one third of its value in the last six months, and the company has been under pressure to boost revenue, which is currently based on advertising. 

The new service will include ads but offer subscribers “a collection of exclusive, experimental, and pre-release features available in Snapchat,” the company said. “This subscription will allow us to deliver new Snapchat features to some of the most passionate members of our community and allow us to provide prioritized support.”

The service is targeted to avid users and joins subscription services recently launched by Twitter and Telegraph. 

Currently more than 332 million people worldwide use Snapchat every day, the company said. 

NEW YORK—Pinterest has announced one of its largest original content deals with a new agreement for Tastemade to supply the platform with 50 new shows as well as hundreds of new hours of live streaming programming for Pinterest TV.

The companies said that the first shows from the multi-year partnership will begin premiering exclusively on Pinterest in Q3 and Q4 of 2022 and throughout 2023. The 50 shows will debut on Pinterest via new content franchises and Idea Pins, Pinterest's multi-page video Pins.

Co-developed by Pinterest, these series will feature talent from both the Tastemade and Pinterest creator communities from around the globe. They will be produced in at least eight different languages from Tastemade's global studios across the U.S, LATAM, Europe, and APAC.

Tastemade will also produce hundreds of hours of new live streaming programming for Pinterest TV. Shot on location and in Tastemade's studios, the live streams will aim to increase total viewership, drive repeat viewers, test shopping behaviors, and encourage community engagement. Tastemade's experience with live streaming commerce will prove valuable in activating creators, brands, and consumers alike, the companies said. 

"As one of our largest video partners globally, I've been so impressed by how Tastemade has expanded their platform, consistently delivers engaging content, and builds value on Pinterest," says chief content officer Malik Ducard, Pinterest. "This is a natural extension of our existing partnership as we scale our content and creator efforts at Pinterest, and I'm thrilled to build something even bigger to inspire Pinners in more languages around the world."

While Pinterest began their creator efforts by focusing on "rising stars" and "homegrown" creators, this newly expanded partnership with Tastemade will also bolster Pinterest's native-first content approach with programmers and publishers as premium content creators, the companies said.

Tastemade already drives some of the most successful content on Pinterest, with Tastemade Pins driving 200% more saves than the average Pin, the companies reported. 

Tastemade currently reaches a global audience of more than 300 million monthly viewers on all major digital, mobile, and streaming television platforms, garnering 700 million minutes watched each month. 

While Tastemade has historically focused on Food, Travel, and Home & Design, this partnership will expand its programming to other categories including Beauty, Fashion, Health & Wellness, Fitness, Parenting, Pets, and more, the companies said. 

"Consumers have undeniably embraced video as the preferred content medium, and one that is especially powerful in inspiring consumers to take action to create a life they love," says co-founder and CEO Larry Fitzgibbon, Tastemade. "The biggest trends in media are now in video, creators, and live streaming – and this partnership addresses all three at global scale. We have a long track record of deeply engaging the Pinterest audience and are excited to take even more Pinners from inspiration to realization through video storytelling."

As a part of the deal, Tastemade will also host a series of in-person creator events at Tastemade studios around the globe (Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Jakarta, Mumbai, São Paulo, Buenos Aires) in many of Pinterest's key international markets. 

NEW YORK—As consumers become more concerned about privacy on social media, a new report from Atlas VPN documents how much tracking goes on in various social media, news, music and sports apps. 

It found that among the social media apps, TikTok and YouTube have the most trackers. Trackers allow ad services to follow users around the web to learn about their browsing habits.

The Atlas VPN research also found that applications in the magazine, news, and sports categories tend to have even more first and third-party trackers.

The research found that TikTok app had 14 trackers, 13 of which were third party contacts that Atlas VPN said are the most concerning in terms of privacy.  

The researchers noted that “third-party trackers are placed by a website you haven’t even visited. These third parties can embed trackers on websites all over the internet, allowing them to collect massive amounts of data on you and share it with whomever they choose.”

The YouTube application has 14 trackers in total, 10 first-party and 4 third-party contacts. 

Twitter and Telegram each have 9 trackers in their iOS applications. However, all 9 contacts in Telegram lead to third-party domains, while the Twitter app tracks users with 6 third-party and 3 first-party contacts.

On average, social media apps have 6 trackers, of which 4 are third-party, and 2 are first-party contacts. 

“Internet users are starting to care more and more about their privacy, which challenges app developers to engage customers using first-party data strategies and tools,” said cybersecurity writer at Atlas VPN. “Currently, customers cannot see what data is being shared with third-party trackers or how their data will be used, creating a lack of transparency between the brand and the consumer.”

The report also found that magazine and news apps filled with trackers

Magazine applications averaged 28 trackers, of which 26 belong to third-party network contacts. The Wall Street Journal app, for example, made 48 total trackers, the most of any magazine app.

News apps averaged 23 trackers, of which 21 lead to third-party network connections. CNN application tracks their readers with 34 total trackers. Washington Post and NBC News apps are not far behind, with 31 and 26 contacts each.

Sports applications follow next as they averaged 22 trackers, of which 18 collect information for third-party contacts. ESPN app has 35 third-party trackers and 42 total.

Music apps averaged 21 trackers, of which 17 belong to third-party network connections. iHeart: Radio application made 56 contacts, with 51 being to third-party networks, which is the most among all apps analyzed in the research.

For more on the report, including a detailed breakdown for social media and news apps visit here. 

LONDON—The dominance of digital media will pass a new milestone in 2022 when worldwide social media advertising will hit $177 billion, overtaking television at $174 billion, according to Zenith’s new Advertising Expenditure Forecasts report. 

Zenith is also predicting that the social media ad spend will rise to $225 billion by 2024, when it will account for 26.5% of all advertising, followed by paid search at 22.5% and television at 21.0%.

Online video advertising will also see rapid growth, with Zenith forecasting that the global online video ad spend will increase from $62 billion in 2021 to $91 billion in 2024, when it will be more than half the size of TV advertising for the first time. 

The linear television ad spend will rise much more modestly from $171 billion in 2022 to $178 billion in 2024, Zenith predicted. 

Overall, Zenith is predicting that the global ad market will continue its recovery from the 2020 downturn with 9.1% growth in 2022, after 15.6% growth in 2021. Then, the global ad spend will expand by 5.7% in 2023 and 7.4% in 2024, with brands looking to leverage more social media, online video, advanced TV, and ecommerce channels.

In another notable milestone, advertising across all digital channels will exceed 60% of global ad spend for the first time in 2022, reaching 61.5% of total expenditure, Zenith is predicting. The digital media share of total global advertising will continue to rise to 65.1% by 2024.

“As consumers rely ever more on digital technology to connect and entertain them, and to inspire and fulfil their purchases, advertising is playing a greater role in driving sales and brand growth,” said Jonathan Barnard, head of forecasting at Zenith. “Over the next three years we expect the ad market to achieve its highest rate of sustained growth since 2000.”

Zenith estimates that global ad spend will reach $705 billion in 2021, up from $634 billion in 2019, and will rise to $873 billion by 2024.

The company cautioned however that the emergence of the omicron variant was not factored into this forecast and that the new COVID variant will increase the risk of more set-backs to the travel, hospitality and bricks-and-mortar retail sectors, which may in turn cause further shifts into ecommerce and digital advertising.

Zenith also noted that “the pace of digital transformation has been higher than expected, as progress towards containing COVID-19 has been slower and consumers have been wary to resume in-store shopping.

Central & Eastern Europe and the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) will be the fastest growing regions in 2022, but most new ad dollars come from the U.S., Zenith said, with the U.S. ad spend forecasted to expand by $80 billion between 2021 and 2024.

Zenith predicts social media will be the fastest-growing channel between 2021 and 2024, with an average annual growth rate of 14.8%, closely followed by online video at 14.0%. Paid search will grow by 9.8% a year, primarily driven by retailer media, and out-of-home will enjoy solid 7.4% annual growth as foot and vehicle traffic return to normal. Radio and television will grow marginally, by 2.2% and 1.4% respectively, while print declines by 4.7%.

CULVER CITY, Calif.—TikTok TV has announced that it has expanded its presence in the U.S. and Canada with the launch of the TikTok TV app on Google TV and other Android TV OS devices, LG Smart TVs, and Samsung Smart TVs.

Earlier this month, TikTok TV launched in the US and Canada with Amazon Fire TV as its first partner. 

The move to the big screen is part of the company’s efforts to position itself as an entertainment destination and to capitalize on the growing audience for YouTube-like videos on connected TVs.  

The company noted that “the TikTok TV app is built for a TV home-viewing experience, making it easy to watch content from our 'For You' and 'Following' feeds on the big screen. This includes the most liked and viewed videos across a huge range of categories, from gaming and comedy to food and animals. To get started, people can login to the TikTok TV app with their existing account. There is also a 'Discover' page, which lets you find more of your favorite content, creators, and categories on TikTok.”

NEW YORK—ViacomCBS Inc. and Twitter have signed a new, multi-year global agreement to deliver premium digital content to the social media platform. The deal includes ViacomCBS' biggest live events, hit shows and iconic franchises from the company's portfolio of entertainment, news and sports brands, including BET, CBS Television Network, CBS News, CBS Sports, Channel 5, CMT, Comedy Central, MTV, Network 10, Nickelodeon, Paramount Network and Telefe.

Paramount+ will also host three Twitter Watch Parties, in partnership with Twitter, to bring fans together, fuel conversation and build community around highly anticipated original series, the companies said. 

The partnership covers all global markets in which Twitter and ViacomCBS operate. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

"We're thrilled to extend our long-standing relationship with Twitter in this expansive global deal that brings together the full ViacomCBS portfolio and magnifies the scale and scope of our valued partnership," said Andrea Wolinetz, senior vice president of distribution and business development-streaming at ViacomCBS. "Twitter is the digital water cooler for trending topics and fandom worldwide, and we're excited to provide front-row access to innovative digital content experiences and culture-defining moments across the best of entertainment, news and sports for Twitter users everywhere."

"We're excited to take our strong partnership to a new level, offering premium content across entertainment, news and sports and giving brands the opportunity to align with ViacomCBS' entire portfolio on a global scale," said Jennifer Prince, head of global content partnerships, Twitter. "Through highlights, Twitter Moments, innovative formats and Paramount+ watch parties, Twitter will put users at the center of the biggest moments happening around the world."

Each of the tentpole programs will be eligible for Twitter marketing support and brand sponsorship sales rights via Twitter's Amplify program, which marries ViacomCBS' premium video with Twitter's paid reach and targeting. ViacomCBS will also tap into a broad range of Twitter marketing features from live video and real-time highlights to Twitter Moments.

Most recently, Twitter and ViacomCBS partnered on the 2021 MTV Video Music Awards and "BET Awards." 

The 2021 "BET Awards" red carpet was live streamed on Twitter, hosted by DJ Envy. 

For the 2021 VMAs, the live pre-show was hosted on Twitter, and the #VMAStanCam was back for the second time, putting fans in the driver's seat and giving them the power to choose the behind-the-scenes and close-up moments they wanted to see.

MTV and Twitter also teamed up on the launch of #VMAStanMail, a first-of-its-kind on-site activation. 

NEW YORK—Nearly two years into the pandemic, a new survey from Deloitte shows that consumers are spending more time with in-home media and that media companies face some tough competition from interactive social media and gaming experiences that can provide consumers with the social connections they crave. 

"It's clear people still want to enjoy socializing with friends and family, even if that means the experience is online and the interaction is from within their homes,” explained Jana Arbanas, vice chairman, Deloitte LLP and U.S. telecom, media and entertainment sector leader. “Streaming video in its current form doesn't satisfy this social desire, so to meet this need, consumers are spending increasingly more time on other forms of online entertainment. Given this reality, streaming companies need to evolve their offerings into connected social experiences in order to keep subscribers interested and engaged, ultimately positioning their businesses for future growth amidst changing behaviors."

The “Deloitte Digital Media Trends Fall Pulse Survey” revealed that 84% of consumers are spending more time on online entertainment at home, compared with in-person entertainment outside the home and that a similar percentage (82%) say they are concerned about COVID-19 variants, and that's likely keeping people indoors and online.

While this has been good for media companies launching streaming services, the survey also found that consumers have a wide array of offerings competing for their attention and that churn remains a major problem. 

Boomers and Gen X still rank "watching TV shows or movies at home" as their favorite entertainment activity while Gen Z still rank "playing video games" as their preferred form of entertainment, the report found. 

About 65% of respondents are frequent gamers, playing at least once a week; on average, these frequent gamers play for around 12 hours a week.

Sixty-five percent (65%) of consumers are engaging with at least one social media service several times a day.

In this landscape, churn is a growing problem. Almost half of millennials (47%) and 34% of Gen Z cancelled and then resubscribed to the same streaming video service later that same year.

The top reason consumers cancelled a paid streaming video on demand (SVOD) service was due to high cost followed by the fact they finished the show they signed up to watch.

About 65% of consumers watch free ad-supported video services.

The report stressed that the survey data shows that the “old normal” patterns of consumer behavior were not returning and that streaming video providers were finding it harder than ever to keep subscribers as people — especially younger generations — are managing costs by adopting ad-supported options, looking for discounts and bundles, and moving on and off services to satisfy their content needs.

This, Deloitte noted, could be ushering in a permanent shift in entertainment, where it's not just about streaming, or the number of subscribers, but also about providing more social and interactive experiences to reduce churn.

"We're seeing an important shift in what consumers are paying attention to and how they are choosing to engage and be entertained,” said Kevin Westcott, vice chairman, Deloitte LLP and U.S. technology, media and telecom leader. “While streaming video will continue to gain momentum, especially with leading services now pursuing global markets, these companies will also need to address churn and retention among diverse segments in different markets, and shift from merely measuring subscribers to understanding how to unlock the lifetime value within their customer bases. It will serve them well in the future to develop growth strategies that include both social video and social gaming, whether through partnerships, acquisitions, or simply establishing a really effective social media department."

Other key day points included:

• About half of consumers (48%) say they spend more time on online entertainment versus six months ago.
• Boomers and Gen X still rank watching TV shows or movies at home as their favorite entertainment activity.
• Gen Z, meanwhile, still rank playing video games as their preferred form of entertainment.
• Everyone younger than Boomers, especially Gen Zs and millennials, have been listening to music more than they were six months ago.
• More premium and ad-supported services have launched, giving U.S. consumers additional options for watching new original content, and accessing a broad content library. The survey revealed that consumers are getting better at developing strategies to access this content while keeping their costs low.
• Eighty-four percent (84%) of respondents now pay for a SVOD service; the average household has four subscriptions — largely unchanged during the past year.
• The churn rate — the number of people who have cancelled, or both added and cancelled, a paid SVOD service — has remained stable at about 38%, although it varies from service to service.
• The top reason consumers cancelled a paid SVOD service was due to high cost followed by the fact they finished the show they signed up to watch.
• Many streaming video subscribers say they actively manage costs in some way, either by looking for deals or promotions, bundles, using friends' or family members' accounts, and other strategies.
• Led by cost-sensitive and savvy millennials and Gen Zs, 65% of respondents reported using free ad-supported video services.
• About 90% of respondents cited using at least one social media service, and the average person uses five different services. This number increases to seven for Gen Zs and millennials, with about a quarter of each using 10 or more different services.
• Sixty-five percent (65%) of consumers are engaging with at least one of these services several times a day.
• The top reasons for using social media are staying connected to friends and family (51%) and staying up to date on news and current events (31%). Discovering new content also ranked highly: 21% use social media to discover new video content, and 16% use it to discover new music.
• While a third of respondents say they are watching more video on paid streaming video services than they were six months ago, nearly as many say they are watching more video on social media and live streaming services. 
• Forty-four percent (44%) of consumers follow an influencer on social media. Among consumers who follow an influencer, the top reason is liking the content they produce (53%). Other top reasons include relating to the influencer (35%), admiring them (29%) and liking the products they promote (29%). 
• Roughly 4 in 10 U.S. respondents say that they have seen a product on social media and gone to the retailer's website to buy it or clicked on an advertisement that led to a purchase.
• Thirty-one percent (31%) of respondents have made a purchase directly on a social media service. Younger consumers are more likely to find recommendations from influencers important to their purchasing decisions.

For additional details on the findings or to listen to an audio file, visit here. 

LONDON—Despite negative press and recent Congressional testimony by a whistleblower criticizing Facebook lack of action in stopping misinformation, a recent survey from the Pew Research Center shows that Facebook and its other platforms still dominate the social media landscape for news and information. 

The survey, which offers a number of important findings for news organizations planning their social media strategies, found that about 31% of those who regularly get news from social media get it from Facebook, with another 11% of those regular social media users for news getting it from Facebook’s Instagram and 3% from WhatsApp. 

That would indicate that Facebook’s various platforms (Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) have about a 45% share among those who get news from social media.  and 

To put those numbers in context, the Pew Research survey also found that the influence of social media as a news outlet remains very important, but is declining. 

It’s survey found that “a little under half (48%) of U.S. adults say they get news from social media `often’ or `sometimes,’ a 5 percentage point decline compared with 2020.” 

Only 19% got their news from social media “often,” a four percentage point decline from 2020, when 23% did. 

In contrast the number of respondents who said they “never” got news from social media rose from 21% in 2020 to 24% in 2021.

Pew asked users of 10 social media sites where they regularly get news on social media and found that about one third of U.S. adults (31%) said they get news regularly on Facebook, followed by YouTube (22%), Twitter (11%), Instagram (11%), Reddit (7%), TikTok (6%), LinkedIn (4%), Snapchat (4%), WhatsApp (3%) and Twitch (1%).

The report also noted that “the majority of regular news consumers of many sites are Democrats or lean Democratic. This may be related to the relatively young age profile of the news consumer base of these social media sites. No social media site included here has regular news consumers who are more likely to be Republican or lean Republican.”

The Pew Research study was based on a survey of 11,178 adults in the U.S. between July 26 to Aug. 8, 2021.

Additional demographic breakdowns and data is available here. 

LONDON & NEW YORK—New research on Americans’ media habits in 2021 suggests that consumers are spending less time bingeing on TV and devoting more time to social media 

Attest’s third annual “US Media Consumption” report polling 2,000 working-age Americans on their media habits found that social media is America’s favorite media in terms of the percentage of people who engage with it each day. About 92.6% of Americans spend some portion of their day on social media, followed by streaming TV services (82.8%) and music streaming (81.1%).  

But the report also found that as pandemic restrictions have lifted this year, binge-watching of both live TV and streaming content has seen marked declines. While Netflix still dominates streaming, the percentage of people engaging in five-hour+ bingeing sessions on streaming platforms is down from 25.9% in 2020 to just 12.4% in 2021, the report found. 

More Americans also stopped watching live TV for more than six hours (8.7%) compared to last year (18.8%). Meanwhile, nearly one in five consumers (19%) say they now watch no live TV in 2021, versus 14% in 2020. 

The survey also found a collapse in the consumption of TV news, potentially caused by pandemic fatigue and the conclusion of the Presidential election, with just under a third of Americans (31.8%) regularly tuning into news content in 2021, compared to 46.3% in 2020. 

This escape from reality is borne out by Americans saying comedy (51.1%), drama (49.8%) and crime (42.3%) programs are their favorite types of TV shows, the report found. 

In terms of social media, the Attest survey found that Americans’ favorite social media platform is YouTube, with 87% using the platform at least once during the month, followed by Facebook (81.9%). 

However, consumers are more likely to use Facebook on a daily basis (54.1%) compared to YouTube (45.3%). 

Meanwhile, TikTok saw substantial growth from 2020’s report with just under half of Americans using the platform at least once over a month (48.3%). 

The vast majority of consumers also appear to have missed the Clubhouse craze with 82.9% saying they never use the platform. 

Unsurprisingly, Gen Z (aged 18-25) used social media on a daily basis the most out of all those polled (at 96%), but the boomer generation (aged 55-66) came next (at 87%). 

In tandem with a decline in bingeing on TV content, Americans are listening to more radio this year, with just 10.9% saying they never listen to the radio (compared to 20% in 2020). Additionally, for the first time since this report was launched, more than half of consumers say they listen to podcasts (55.9%), compared to 48.7% in 2020. 

In terms of streaming the report found that Netflix dominates in the streaming wars, with nearly seven in ten Americans having a subscription (69.4%), followed by Amazon Prime (52%) and Disney Plus (36.9%).   

Over two-thirds (67.2%) of consumers say they do not have any paid-for content subscriptions for news media. Of the minority who do subscribe in 2021, digital subscriptions (19.5%) are only just ahead of print (18%). 

The data in the report is from research conducted on the Attest platform. The total sample size for this research was 2,000 nationally representative working-age consumers based in the United States. The survey concluded on 12 August 2021. 

STANFORD, Calif.—A new study by Stanford University has found that watching TV while also scrolling social media can lead to memory loss.

The research, published in Nature, found that people who reported engaging in multiple forms of digital media at once, such as watching TV while texting and browsing social media, had a poorer memory than those who concentrated on just one.

The research team gave 80 adults aged 18 to 26 a memory task during which they recorded neural signals of attention lapsing, memory and pupil size.

Participants’ ability to sustain attention was measured by how well they were able to identify a gradual change in an image. They were briefly shown images of objects on a computer screen. After a 10-minute delay, they were shown more images and asked to identify if they were bigger or smaller, more pleasant or unpleasant, or if they had seen the image previously.

They also completed questionnaires to measure their level of media multitasking, impulsivity, everyday attention and mind wandering.

Results showed that attention lapses in the moment prior to remembering impacted on behavioral and neural memory signals and were associated with greater likelihood of forgetting.

“Limiting potential distractions can be useful in memory preparedness and reducing mind wandering or mind blanking,” said the report authors.

Time to put the phone down and concentrate on the TV.

PORTO & LISBON, Portugal—MOG Technologies has introduced mediaSocial, a new enhanced model for its mfxSpeedrail central ingest product focused on use for social media ingest and publication.

The new software application supports multiple social media video content streams with up to four live and four video-on-demand (VOD) operations at the same time. 

Retrieving from and publishing content to a wide range of social media channels, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitch, YouTube, Vimeo and Twitter, is easily done with a simple setup configuration that enables graphic burn-in and metadata annotation and preservation.

The new enhanced version offers input and output to and from social media gateways, full remote and local user interface, closed captions, Google Chrome extension and manual and automatic operation modes.

The mediaSocial application is available in different versions to match the unique requirements of users.

They include: 

• Software—mediaSocial dual for two operations
• Software—mediaSocial quad for four operations 
• MediaSocial Densu 
• Densu—mediaSocial Densu-2 
• Standard—mediaSocial 

The company will be presenting the new product during a virtual event, Sept. 11-30.

To schedule a virtual meeting, visit the company’s website. 

COVID-19 has compelled broadcasters to use home-based workers extensively. In doing so, both sides have had to endure lower-quality performance and productivity in content creation, plus the reduced capabilities available to home-based users compared to those working in production centers and studios. 

These problems have arisen because a typical broadcaster’s network infrastructure was never designed to serve so many remote connections and functions. Add the inferior cybersecurity available to home-based users (and the incursion risks this poses to broadcasters), and working from home has been a necessary workaround at best.

Fortunately, there is an available, feasible, and affordable IT solution to all of these problems. It is the innately secure communications protocol known as Teradici PC-over-IP (Teradici PCoIP). 

In place of traditional two-way data communications, Teradici PCoIP compresses, encrypts and transmits only video pixels from the broadcaster to home-based/remote users. The actual file remains within the broadcaster’s domain, with any interactions going through a secure interface that keeps the content safe. 

On the home workers’ display screens, everything looks the same. The video quality is lossless and color accurate, while the entire experience of connecting from any remote location via PCoIP looks and feels like using a conventional computer at work. Video editing performance is unaffected because Teradici PCoIP technology can deliver full-motion video up to 4K at high frame rates to home-based/remote computers.

Teradici PCoIP has been adopted by many industry players including Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) of Star Wars fame. Because PCoIP sends pixels rather than complete files, its bandwidth requirements are relatively small. This is why ILM uses PCoIP to share dailies between its San Francisco headquarters and collaborators worldwide. Doing so avoids sending proprietary video files as large as 100GB or larger over the internet.

On August 11, 2020 at 2pm eastern, Teradici Technical Marketing Principal Ian Main will share how Teradici PCoIP (and other Teradici products) can provide broadcasters and their home-based workers with a secure, efficient, and scalable virtual work environment. He will also detail how ILM and other users are using PCoIP today, and how easily broadcasters can implement PCoIP in their own IT infrastructures.

To register click here.

Social media has become a critical element for broadcasters to deliver stories quickly and engage viewers and is the key topic of discussion in the webinar “Social Media Platforms—Profit or Problems.” This new webinar features the following speakers:

Bob Papper, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Journalism at Hofstra University and Professor Emeritus at Ball State University

Ray Thompson, director of market solutions, Broadcast & Media, Avid

Craig Wilson, product evangelist, Broadcast & Media, Avid

This webinar explores the everyday challenges that face news producers globally to capture audiences across multiple platforms, with the solution experts looking at the essential need for a connected workflow to accelerate news production and distribution.

You can now watch the webinar on-demand.

LONDON—“Made-for-social” video content is rising in popularity, especially among younger viewers, and that demand is being met by many social platforms with the commissioning of projects. But traditional broadcasters are also attempting to get in on the action, often in a funding role, according to Ampere Analysis.

Based on research into the strategies of digital studios, Ampere has found that digital studio groups are diving further into video specifically aimed at social platforms. Since the middle of 2018, YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat have commissioned more than 200 digital originals, scripted and unscripted. 2020 will see the launch of another platform, Quibi, which has more than 80 projects of its own in development.

However, while digital studios are interested in creating content specifically for these platforms, there’s an ebb and flow to their ability to produce them. Following 44 projects commissioned in Q4 2018, only 10 titles were commissioned by the social players in Q1 2019; it would rise to 68 in Q3 2019.

“The nature of fast-evolving digital space requires that digital studios need to ensure long-term sustainable growth over short-term gains,” said Henry Beckwith, analyst at Ampere.

One source to help provide stabilization may be traditional broadcast entities. Ampere points out the incumbent broadcast groups have larger budgets than OTT for commissioned content. Add that with their desire to access younger audiences that are increasingly drawn to video on social platforms (Snapchat and Instagram have largest batch of young viewers, 78% and 63% of 18 to 34 year olds, respectively), and broadcasters are looking for ways in.

Digital studios are working with broadcasters, discovering talent and create or license IP to commercial and public broadcast groups. What will make this strategy successful, according to Ampere, is “spotting and securing social video personalities early and adopting formats that could be easily shifted to a broadcast environment.”

For more information, visit Ampere Analysis’ website.

LAS VEGAS—Television news directors have a love-hate relationship with social media; they love the traffic it brings to their stations’ websites, but they aren’t too wild about the effort and expense of making frequent posts, says Bob Papper, emeritus distinguished professor of journalism at Hofstra University and professor emeritus at Ball State University.

“News directors know they have to do social media. They know why they have to do social media; and they wish they didn’t have to,” says Papper, who will present some of his research findings on social media and TV newsrooms Nov. 21 at 1 p.m. EDT during the “Social Media Platforms—Profit or Problem” TVTechnology webinar sponsored by Avid Technology. (Full disclosure: I am moderating this hour-long webinar.)

The problem with social media centers on how a newsroom does social media without it “eating you alive,” he says. “That’s a valid question because it takes up a lot of time of your station and your staff.”

In a recent article for the RTDNA, “Serious Consolidation in Social Media in TV … and Maybe a New Trend with Twitter,” Papper examined how newsrooms are employing social media and the attitudes of news directors about social media based on findings from the latest RTDNA/Hofstra University survey. Papper will discuss his findings during the Nov. 21 webinar.

TV newsrooms really want to avoid duplicating effort when it comes to social media, digital and on-air content. “In some respects, you are doing the same thing over and over and over again. And that is a killer, especially for a station that is smaller staffed,” he says.

For stations with an adequately sized news staff, social media is “an inconvenience,” but for smaller and medium-sized stations it becomes a “huge problem,” he says.

Staffing is only part of the problem, however. Arguably, the more serious problem stations face with social media is that there is not enough money in it to make the endeavor profitable –at least on its own, he says.

“Facebook makes money in social media. Google makes money in social media. If you throw in Amazon, you have 70% of all the revenue that goes to social media, and stations get essentially nothing,” says Papper.

Regardless, stations know they must do social media, he explains. Social media promotes audience engagement with the station.

While social media on its own might not fill station coffers, broadcasters that know how to use social media to promote engagement can use their posts to drive audience to station websites –a destination broadcasters can monetize, he says.

“For the most part, the majority of audience you get online comes via social media,” says Papper.

Broadcasters, however, should be realistic about their social media expectations, Papper cautions.

While young people are heavy social media users, it’s not too likely that a station will attract large numbers from this age group simply because it posts to Facebook or some other destination. This has more to do with the fact that young people don’t typically read or watch the news, he says.

“The last time young people read and watched local news was in the 1960s and early 1970s,” says Papper. “We could send young people back to news today by reinstituting the draft. But since we probably are not going to do that, the first thing we need to do is be realistic about it.”

Register for the “Social Media Platforms –Profit or Problems” webinar.

CHANTILLY, Va.—The 2020 presidential election will help U.S. local advertising revenue reach new heights, a projected $161.3 billion to be exact, according to a recent report from BIA Advisory Services.

BIA’s “U.S. Local Advertising Forecast 2020” forecast would be a 5.8% growth rate from the $152.5 billion in ad revenue from 2019, with political ad spending helping to boost revenue. Where this revenue comes from is also seeing significant change, as BIA sees increases in ad revenue from OTT and social media, though traditional media will remain the biggest resource.

Traditional media is expected to account for $94.4 billion of the ad revenue in 2020, up from $93.2 billion in 2019, which would make up 58.5% of the total revenue. Online/digital revenue will see a larger growth, however, earning an estimated $66.9 billion in 2020, or 41.5% of the total revenue; it earned $59.3 billion in 2019. OTT and social media are big drivers for this increase.

BIA forecasts that $1.06 billion in local activated advertising will be spent on OTT in 2020, and that number will grow to $2.13 billion by 2024. For social, $29.5 billion will be spent in 2020, growing to $44.6 billion by 2024. Social media ad revenue primarily comes from mobile devices, with them currently representing a 93.8% total and an expectation to hit 96% by 2024, as mobile native/social is the fastest growing segment of mobile advertising at 13.9%.

As far as the specifics of political ad spending, BIA projects that $6.58 billion will be spent for the 2020 elections. Over-the-air will account for nearly half ($3.07 billion or 47%), but online digital will bring in about 22% ($1.42 billion) and even OTT is getting in on the action, with an estimated $51 million (0.8%).

“The expectation of an aggressive presidential election next year, along with primaries and state-wide races, indicate that political ad spending will be a serious driver of local ad revenue next year,” said Mark Fratrik, chief economist and senior vice president at BIA. “Combine these factors with the ongoing growth of mobile and social advertising and the emergence and future significant advancement in over-the-top advertising, the revenue landscape for next year looks robust.”

The full “U.S. Local Advertising Forecast 2020” report is available on BIA’s website.

BURLINGTON, Mass.—The rise of social media, digital and smartphones as go-to sources of news and information for millions of consumers is transforming how broadcasters view their role as a critical source of news, weather and sports, says Ray Thompson, director of Market Solutions, Broadcast & Media at Avid.

“Just repurposing stories that go out over traditional OTA [over-the-air] broadcast won’t cut it,” he says Thompson. “Having a social/digital strategy is a requirement as data shows more and more people rely on mobile and social platforms for their news/sports source.”

To register for the “Social Media Platforms –Profit or Problems” webinar, Nov. 21, click here.

Thompson and Craig Wilson, product evangelist, Broadcast & Media at Avid, will present their perspectives on the evolution of TV newsrooms as they leverage social, digital and mobile Nov. 21 at 1 p.m. EDT during the “Social Media Platforms –Profit or Problems” TVTechnology webinar, sponsored by Avid Technology. (Full disclosure: I am moderating this hour-long webinar.)

In the past, journalists focused their efforts on creating news stories for TV or one particular news show or bulletin with specific deadlines, says Wilson. “Now they need to be able to produce across many platforms and meet almost instant deadlines.”

No longer do journalists hold stories till airtime. Today, they are looking to publish as soon as they have information and then refine and update the story throughout the day as well as produce a package for the evening news, says Wilson.

As a consequence, workflows and the thinking of journalists and news managers are changing in newsrooms. “Journalists now have lots of competing demands for their time, and it requires a new, creative mindset to deliver throughout the day on these platforms and then on-air,” adds Wilson.

One workflow strategy that’s popular among stations is merging traditional TV news teams with digital/social media teams into a single unit. “Even if they are not merged, stations want them to collaborate and to be as efficient as possible so they can pool their resources and deliver the biggest bang for their buck in terms of content production,” adds Wilson.

While disruptive to traditional TV newsroom workflows, these new platforms offer broadcasters that leverage their full potential benefits that extend far beyond bringing news to consumers faster, says Thompson.

“As producers develop content, they may be publishing to different social, web and app platforms that are built to cater to different demographics,” he says. “This can help stations realize higher ad rates and higher CPMs as the ads served are easier to deliver to a specific audience and demographic group.”

The availability of analytics about consumers of news on these social and digital platforms enables broadcasters and other content creators to deliver metrics to ad buyers looking to reach different groups with ads, he says.

“To be successful, content creators and publishers must deliver a TV-like experience –meaning no buffering—to any device, anywhere, anytime, then measure both the network –meaning reliability--and the playback, including who is watching, for how long and potentially where, and last but not least, develop a more catered experience based on the types of content and shows a user is watching,” says Thompson.

To register for the “Social Media Platforms –Profit or Problems” webinar, Nov. 21, click here.

BURLINGTON, Mass.—As viewers continue to get more and more information and content through social media, Avid has updated its MediaCentral | Publisher platform to better utilize social media, which according to Pew Research Center, 68% of Americans use to get their news.

The new MediaCentral | Publisher is powered by Wildmoka and part of Avid’s MediaCentral 2019 media workflow platform for news, sports and post-production operations. With the new unit, users can now log content, search for and access media, create a highlight sequence in the timeline, add graphics and then publish across social and digital platforms.

“With MediaCentral | Publisher powered by Wildmoka, Avid has significantly improved our customers’ ability to be first to deliver news on digital platforms,” said Ray Thompson, director of broadcast and media solutions marketing at Avid. “Being first to deliver content improves our customers’ ability to engage viewers on social, drive consumers to their digital platforms and increase digital revenue.”

Avid will make the new MediaCentral | Publisher available in late September. The company will also show the product at its stand, 7.B55, during IBC 2019.

Too much screen time with TV and on social media exacerbates the symptoms of depression among adolescents, according to new research findings published in JAMA Pediatrics.

The study, conducted by researchers from the University of Montreal, CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center in Montreal and the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, found that increasing social media use, TV viewing and computer use by a single hour within a year increased the severity of depression in that year among adolescents. No link was found between video game use and depression.

The findings indicate that adolescent use of social media and television should be regulated to prevent depression and to reduce worsening symptoms over time.

The researchers drew on responses from 3,826 adolescents (with 3,659 participants supplying usable data) to online self-assessments in which adolescents were asked to rank on a scale of zero to four the extent of their depression in seven symptom categories, such as loneliness, sadness and hopelessness.

They were also asked about their screen time each day playing video games, watching television, visiting social media sites and using the computer, excluding video games.

Students at 31 Montreal-area schools completed the assessment and were studied from grade 7 to 11. Data was collected between September 2012 and September 2018.

“We found an association between social media and depression in adolescence,” the researchers wrote.

Repeated exposure to what they termed “idealized images” lowers the self-esteem of adolescents and triggers depression. “Furthermore, heavier users of social media with depression appear to be more negatively affected by their time spent on social media …,” they wrote.

The researchers suggested that further research should be conducted to examine whether social media algorithms affect this process.

When it came to TV, the study found that adolescents who are less prone to depression are more likely to watch television. The research “demonstrated that the tendency to engage in high mean levels of television over four years was associated with less depression,” they wrote. However, “any further” growth in TV use in the same year pushed depression symptoms higher.

“[W]e argue that watching more television over time increases the likelihood of upward social comparison to occur, in turn potentially triggering and enhancing depression,” they wrote.

Computer screen time also appears to be tied to youth depression as well. However, increased time using the computer was positively associated with the belief in one’s ability to perform computer tasks, which may lessen the overall severity of depression, the researchers suggested.

The research findings were published online July 15 in an article entitled “Association of Screen Time and Depression in Adolescence.” 

CHESTERFIELD, Mo.—The U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team began their 2019 FIFA’s Women’s World Cup title defense with a record-setting 13-0 win over Thailand on Tuesday, and according to a recent study from Amdocs, many soccer fans watched the opening match via a social media streaming channel.

With the Women’s World Cup going on from now until July 7, Amdocs conducted a survey of 1,000 U.S. viewers on how they plan to watch the games following record-breaking viewing numbers for traditional and online/mobile viewing from the 2015 tournament. The report is titled “Stream On: Young Viewers at the Forefront of Women’s World Cup’s Digital Audience.”

While live cable/paid television remains the most popular method for watching the World Cup games (26%), streaming is the next pick at 13%. This is even more true among viewers in the 18-24 age range, with 22% saying they plan to watch via a streaming service. This correlates with the finding that younger viewers (18-24 and 25-34 ages ranges) are more open to new sport viewing experiences—78% of 18-24-year-olds and 63% of 25-34-year-olds have said they have live streamed a sporting event.

An example of a new sport viewing experience is watching via a social media channel. With 56% of respondents saying they would watch a game via a mobile device of tablet, 23% said that they would pick a social media channel as a primary streaming channel. Again, the number rises with the younger demographic, with 30% of 18-24-year-olds watching through social media. In addition, social media is a way to discuss and share moments of the game while they are going on, with 31% of total users choosing to do so.

The younger generation is also more interested in new developments with sports viewing. Things like 5G improving streaming experiences has the interest of nearly all respondents, but more than half for those 18-24. VR/AR (27%) and 360-degree live camera views (31%) are also elements that younger respondents said they would consider paying more for with their sports packages.

“Consumers’ sports viewing preferences have shifted dramatically over the past decade as new channels enter the fold and demand in immediate gratification and convenience spikes,” Amdocs’ report reads. “As media consumption habits shift, we’re seeing the effects ripple across the landscape, forcing service providers to rethink how they’re engaging and attracting their target audiences, as well as fostering loyalty amongst repeat customers, especially when it comes to younger consumers.”

Sports coverage is changing. More than ever before, we’re finding that leagues, clubs, associations and event organizers are taking control of their own content. Organizers can be federations, teams, leagues, tours, individual events and the agencies that represent them. For the purposes of this article, let’s oversimplify and refer to them as “leagues,” knowing that they self-identify and can be organized with great diversity.

When we ask why leagues are producing so much more than before, we see a variety of inter-related factors driving this trend. When you look at them together, it’s hard to imagine how every league in the future wouldn’t have a unit that works and functions a lot like a multimedia sports newsroom.

Below are some of the catalysts we found to be driving this movement:

1. Leagues spent millions to capitalize on social. Over the past five to 10 years, every league has needed to invest in and develop a social strategy to capitalize on the popularity of sport on those platforms. Many developed content strategies that were social first but have realized that actually it’s not everything, and now seek to make the most of those investments through broader and more diverse distribution of that content via more traditional channels.
2. Leagues are plugging the holes created by the shrinkage of independent newsrooms. Sports desks are not immune to the pressures to reduce costs in the face of falling ad revenue. Leagues are stepping in to create coverage of their events to ensure fans can follow all their action, not just the events independent newsrooms can justify covering.
3. Gaming revenue is growing. It turns out that gap is widening from both sides as integration gets tighter between leagues and the gambling industry. Leagues have greater incentive to serve that constituency, often with events that don’t warrant mainstream coverage but pull their weight through the gaming audience. Again, the leagues find themselves incentivised to create coverage themselves.
4. Sports fans want more personal, authentic content that only leagues can produce. Modern fans want to see athletes sharing personal stories, inside jokes and having real conversations. They have an aversion to watching the traditional press conference, which too often feels staged and choreographed to be as inauthentic and “safe” as possible. Event organizers have found themselves in a unique position to capture or create more fun, off-the-pitch content that Gen Z sports fans want, and news organizations can’t realistically produce at scale.
5. Leagues are seeing a bright light at the end of the online tunnel. Traditional TV sport distribution has developed organically over the past 80 years into a very lucrative but also ungainly web of rights deals. They come with restrictions that can limit innovation and very shallow audience data. Increasingly organizers are finding the more predictable, controlled and transparent business OTT and online platform partnerships offer them are more satisfying. These services are most successful when games are supplemented with news coverage, interviews, etc., which the leagues are producing for them. It will be awhile before those gargantuan and complicated broadcast contracts take a back seat to digital distribution for top leagues, but if this trend continues it might not be quite as long as you think because …
6. Leagues are making it a priority to get to know (and cross-sell to) fans directly. Front offices are combining customer data from ticket sales, merchandise sales, online viewing and social engagement to develop CRM systems that aim to categorize and keep track of all fans. Data from content consumption can be a key piece of this puzzle (see #5). With better data on fan behavior, leagues can cross-sell their services more efficiently and create content that is measurably better at achieving specific goals.
7. Most leagues have global expansion plans. Breaking into a new market, often across a language barrier, to a land where news coverage does not generally prioritize your sport is a lofty goal shared by almost all leagues. This creates an incentive for leagues to create content fans in these regions can use to stay connected.
8. Sponsors expect a lot more than just a bit of signage. They want to see their products being used organically in the context of the sport. They want to activate in creative ways, especially on social, and they want to measure everything they can. As the sponsorships continue to become more valuable and complex, sports bodies will be under pressure to find new ways to prove those sponsors are getting value for their money. The news content created by leagues provides another platform for sponsorship activation that can range from simple to innovative.

If most of these trends continue, leagues will have incentive to develop more comprehensive files of news style content for their fans and I fully expect those newsrooms to start surpassing some more sophisticated broadcast and digital news publishers on the maturity curve, at least in their chosen domain.

In these trends, there are new opportunities for traditional media companies to partner with leagues in new ways. At Reuters, we’ve expanded what was a more regional sports agency globally —Action Images—to help leagues benefit from our traditional media know-how to create, monetize and distribute their own news content globally.

If you’re at a sports desk and this new competition is making you queasy, don’t reach for the Alka-Seltzer just yet. There is one big catch for the purists out there. Everyone knows this content is always going to at least come with some perceived bias. The leagues will openly admit they have an agenda in creating this content; the fans know it instinctively. We won’t read many negative opinions on questionable coaching decisions, bad behavior off the pitch by athletes, the latest front office scandal or labor disputes in league-generated content. That’s still squarely the role of independent media, and readers will always seek and value balanced coverage for the competitions they love most.

Rob Shack is vice president of Reuters Sport.