Video Viewing Habits: What to Know, How It’s Going to Go

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TikTok will soon surpass Facebook as the most-consumed social network among US adults, according to a new report. It’s part of a wider trend that sees the time adults spend watching digital video overtake that of cable and satellite delivered TV for the first time in 2023.

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The briefing from Insider Intelligence forecasts that this year, adults in the US will watch on average two hours and 55 minutes of TV per day but digital video time will climb to three hours and 11 minutes. It means that linear TV will drop below 50% of total time spent with TV for the first time while digital video will make up 52.3%.

“The growth of digital video is especially impressive when you consider that, as recently as four years ago, it accounted for roughly half of TV time,” comments Paul Verna, principal analyst and head of the digital advertising and media desk at Insider Intelligence.

“And bear in mind that our time spent forecasts are for adults only. Given teens’ preferences for social and streaming video over TV, we can expect these trends to continue to shift in favor of digital.”

Live sports shifting to streaming services is one reason why digital video consumption is surpassing TV. YouTube won the NFL Sunday Ticket at the end of last year, stealing Sunday evening football games away from DirecTV. MLB sold the streaming rights to Friday night games to Apple TV+ and Sunday morning games to Peacock.

Another leading factor of digital video time is social video. The report predicts average daily time spent with videos on social networks among US adults will climb 9.3% to 45.2 minutes this year. TikTok is a key driver: Its total time spent among all US adults will rise 14.2% this year to 17.4 minutes.

With time spent with Facebook on the decline, TikTok will overtake it next year as the most-consumed social network among US adults, the report states.

“TikTok versus Netflix will be a major trend to watch this year,” noted Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence. “The lines between social and entertainment have blurred, and TikTok is now coming for the bigger-screen video players.

“New TikTok users add incremental new time spent, while its efforts in longer-form video, livestreaming and, more recently, music streaming, keep users on the platform longer. Growth in time spent on Netflix, meanwhile, is stagnant.”

Twitter use among US adults is in decline — expected to drop 10.7% this year and another 13.3% in 2024 in total time spent on the platform. Insider Intelligence says that the problem is that Twitter’s efforts to encourage more original videos, from Vine to Fleets, have so far been unsuccessful.

“Twitter owner Elon Musk’s attempts to bring more video to the app, including potentially incentivizing YouTube creators to post to Twitter, will be futile at improving time spent among all US adults unless he also manages to stave off a user decline.”