The changing consumer: A little less media usage, but more of it is online

A new Veronis Suhler Stevenson report released 02-August-2007 — the VSS Forecast 2007 — throws light on changing consumer media consumption patterns.

According to VSS, consumers spent slightly less time with media in 2006 than they did the previous year, as media usage per person declined 0.5% to 3,530 hours, due to changing consumer behaviors and digital media efficiencies:

"The drop in consumer media usage was driven by the continued migration of consumers to digital alternatives for news, information and entertainment, which require less time investment than their traditional media counterparts. For example, consumers typically watch broadcast or cable television at least 30 minutes per session while they spend as little as five to seven minutes viewing consumer-generated video clips online.  VSS expects consumer media usage to stabilize in 2007 and increase slightly through 2011, as out-of-home media and videogames will be the only major segments to achieve accelerating growth in the forecast period compared with the 2001-2006 timeframe. Overall consumer time spent with media will increase at a CAGR of 0.5% from 2006 to 2011, compared with 0.8% in the previous five-year period."

The VSS Forecast claims to be "the only source to track, analyze and forecast spending, usage and trends in all 19 segments and more than 100 sub-segments of the U.S. media industry", and declares itself as providing "the industry’s most accurate spending forecasts" with an impressively low ±2% historical margin of error over the last 10 years.