An official survey in the UK shows that TikTok has replaced TV as the most popular entertainment source for young adults, while a separate Pew study reveals that 95% of US teens watch YouTube, many of them “almost constantly.”
Use of both apps and streaming services has dramatically changed the landscape for broadcast television …
TikTok replaced TV
The Financial Times reports on this year’s results from the UK’s annual report on media consumption from the Office of Communications, Ofcom.
Young adults in the UK are spending more time scrolling on social media site TikTok than watching broadcast television, according to an Ofcom report on Wednesday that highlights the growing generational divide in media habits […]
A study for Ofcom by the polling company Ipsos estimated that those aged 15 to 24 spent 57 minutes a day on TikTok alone. This is longer than the 53 minutes that the 16-to-24 age group spends watching broadcast television, a according to a separate survey for Ofcom by BARB, an audience rating agency […]
Less than half of 16 to 24-year-olds watched at least 15 minutes a week of programming on a public-service channel such as a the BBC, ITV or Channel 4.
This is in sharp contrast to over-65s, who watch almost six hours of broadcast TV per day.
Subscription streaming services continue to grow their revenues, up 27% last year. Around one fifth of paying streaming video subscribers pay for all three of Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney Plus.
95% of US teens watch YouTube
A separate Pew Research Center poll found that 95% of US teens watch YouTube, while 67% use TikTok. Other popular apps for those aged 13 to 17 are Instagram (62%) and Snapchat (59%).
Facebook and Twitter, meantime, are increasingly out of favor with teenagers, the former used by 32% this year, compared to 71% in 2015. Twitter suffered a less dramatic but still significant fall, from 33% down to 23%.
Things get even starker when you look at the most-used apps. For YouTube, 19% of teens say they watch it “almost constantly,” and a further 41% “several times a day.” This contrasts with Facebook, where the same figures are just 2% and 8%, respectively.
Pew also asked how US teens felt about their social media usage, and how difficult it would be to give it up.
When reflecting on the amount of time they spend on social media generally, a majority of U.S. teens (55%) say they spend about the right amount of time on these apps and sites, while about a third of teens (36%) say they spend too much time on social media. Just 8% of teens think they spend too little time on these platforms.
Asked about the idea of giving up social media, 54% of teens say it would be at least somewhat hard to give it up, while 46% say it would be at least somewhat easy.
Teen girls are more likely than teen boys to express it would be difficult to give up social media (58% vs. 49%). Conversely, a quarter of teen boys say giving up social media would be very easy, while 15% of teen girls say the same. Older teens also say they would have difficulty giving up social media. About six-in-ten teens ages 15 to 17 (58%) say giving up social media would be at least somewhat difficult to do. A smaller share of 13- to 14-year-olds (48%) think this would be difficult.
You can read the full report here.
Bizarrely, Apple reportedly threatened to fire one of its engineers for posting a helpful TikTok video which emphasized the security of iPhones.
Photo: Aaron Weiss/Unsplash
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