---
type: source
title: "Despite Predicted Downturn, Global Media Consumption Grew Again in 2025 — Approaching 13 Hours/Day"
author: "The Drum / eMarketer"
url: https://www.thedrum.com/news/despite-prepicted-downturn-global-media-consumption-grew-yet-again-in-2025
date: 2026-01-15
domain: entertainment
secondary_domains: []
format: article
status: null-result
priority: medium
tags: [media-consumption, total-media-time, digital-video, zero-sum-claim, creator-economy, eMarketer, attention-economy]
extraction_model: "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5"
---

## Content

**Key data points (eMarketer, The Drum):**
- US adults approaching 13 hours of total daily media consumption in 2026
- Daily time with digital media increasing to ~8 hours/day in 2025 (from 7h19m in 2022)
- Daily time with digital video INCREASING by 15 minutes in 2026
- Average social media use: 2 hours 40 minutes/day
- TikTok: 1 hour 37 minutes/day per user globally
- Total media time keeps "inching higher even as the top-line number has reached unprecedented heights"
- Traditional media declining but digital growth more than compensating
- Media consumption grew in 2025 despite industry predictions of a plateau

**Separate data point (YouTube/creator context):**
- YouTube's 2025 ad revenue: $40.4B (exceeded Disney + NBCU + Paramount + WBD combined at $37.8B)
- YouTube's total 2025 revenue: $60B
- U.S. creator economy ad spend: $37.1B in 2026, forecasted $43.9B in 2027

## Agent Notes

**Why this matters:** Directly challenges the KB claim "creator and corporate media economies are zero-sum because total media time is stagnant and every marginal hour shifts between them." Total media time is NOT stagnant — it's growing. This undermines the zero-sum mechanism.

**What surprised me:** I expected a plateau or saturation at some point. But media time keeps growing — people are somehow finding more hours. This suggests the competitive dynamic between creator and corporate media is NOT primarily about time-share, it's about ATTENTION QUALITY and REVENUE CAPTURE, not total time.

**What I expected but didn't find:** Evidence that media consumption has plateaued. The data shows persistent growth.

**KB connections:**
- [[creator and corporate media economies are zero-sum because total media time is stagnant and every marginal hour shifts between them]] — this is the cascade claim that was CHANGED in PR #3900. The data here explains why: the "stagnant" premise is empirically wrong. Media time is growing. The zero-sum framing needs qualification.
- [[social video is already 25 percent of all video consumption and growing because dopamine-optimized formats match generational attention patterns]] — confirms and extends
- Position "creator media economy will exceed corporate media revenue by 2035" — the YouTube $40.4B milestone makes this more complex: the milestone already happened for AD REVENUE in 2025. The "exceed" threshold may need to be redefined (which revenue metric? by when?).

**Extraction hints:**
- Challenge/correction to the zero-sum claim: the mechanism should be "creator economy is capturing REVENUE SHARE from corporate media" not "capturing TIME from stagnant total." Revenue dynamics and time dynamics are different.
- Possible new claim: "total media consumption continues to grow while traditional media's share declines, meaning the creator economy's gains are partly additive rather than purely extractive from corporate media"
- The position "creator media economy will exceed corporate media revenue by 2035" needs a scope clarification: ad revenue milestone crossed in 2025, but total revenue including theatrical, physical sales, subscription, licensing has not crossed yet.

**Context:** The Drum article explicitly notes the consumption growth despite "predicted downturn" — this is a second-order confirmation that the plateau prediction was wrong. Multiple sources converge: eMarketer US Time Spent 2026, Statista 2025-2026 data, SQ Magazine screen time statistics, Demandsage social media averages.

## Curator Notes

PRIMARY CONNECTION: [[creator and corporate media economies are zero-sum because total media time is stagnant and every marginal hour shifts between them]] — the "stagnant" premise is empirically wrong

WHY ARCHIVED: Provides the empirical basis for the correction to the zero-sum claim. If total media time is growing, the mechanism isn't "fixed pie" competition — it's relative share capture in a growing market. This changes the strategic implications.

EXTRACTION HINT: The extractor should focus on the specific numbers (13 hours approaching, 8 hours digital, +15 min digital video in 2026) AND the policy implication: zero-sum vs. growing-pie changes the prediction for corporate media's survivability. A growing pie can sustain both creator growth AND corporate media decline simultaneously.
