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| Photo: Sean Hargrave |
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You only have to look at teens to pick up a very simple truth. Every piece of content they seem to consume is on a mobile phone, and it all appears to be accompanied by noise from pictures you can't see. Unless they have headphones turned on, of course, and then you can still bet the content they're consuming is video."
The simple truth? The Internet is moving to video. The move is already underway with Millennials, but it will be underscored when today's teens are in their mid- to late twenties in a decade's time.
As a complete coincidence, I have been researching with earbud manufacturers how the market for bluetooth headphones and earbuds has now overtaken wired headphones. No -- it's not just the iPhone 7 that has prompted the cord-cutting. According to one very knowledgeable researcher, the move began to gather momentum three years ago. The only reason he could think of was teens and Millennials watching longer shows on their smartphone and not wanting the cord to get in the way.
So what does this mean, other than that our teenage sons and daughters spending more time hunched over a smaller screen and the ever-present battle for USB ports to charge devices heating up as bluetooth headsets and earbuds get low on juice?
Well, if you want to quantify the size of this shift, some MediaCom figures in Marketing Tech News are well worth checking out. A year ago a quarter of teens were saying their smartphone is the main way to watch television. This year, it has risen to 38%. Interestingly, a key fact behind this rising trend is that two in three 8- to 12-year-olds now own a smartphone, compared to just under half two years ago.
Pre-teens are getting tooled up in this mobile-first media landscape of ours, and so it's not surprising that they are starting to consume more and more video content on a device they can treat as personal, unlike television.
As far as other media are concerned, some eMarketer research for the US market shows a very noticeable shift toward mobile apps and mobile publishers for Millennials that is not being followed up by teens. Instead, they appear to be moving away from mobile publishers and bloggers to watching more video. More than half of all teens show they are spending more time on social and watching more video. The same move is being seen among Millennials, but it's no quite as pronounced, certainly not with ditching the written word one would associate with bloggers.
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Source: MediaPost Communications -Today's Opinions
