Mass Markets And Mass Media

I’ve written a number of times over the last few years about the changing patterns of content consumption and how those changes are affecting the media business. I read some statistics last week that make me think we’re almost at the tipping point where we’ll see some irreversible things happening that affect not just media but marketing as well.

First, the statistics. The report is GfK‘s The Home Technology Monitor and while there wasn’t much “new” in it, the acceleration of some trends is interesting:

New findings from GfK show that US TV households are embracing alternatives to cable and satellite reception. Levels of broadcast-only reception and Internet-only video subscriptions have both risen over the past year, with fully one-quarter (25%) of all US TV households now going without cable and satellite reception. TV households with a resident between 18 and 34 years old are much more likely to be opting for alternatives to cable and satellite; 22% of these homes are using broadcast-only reception (versus 17% of all US households), and 13% are only watching an Internet service on their TV sets (versus 6% of all TV homes). Overall, 38% of 18-to-34 households rely on some kind of alternative TV reception or video source, versus 25% of all homes.

Why this is meaningful has to do with the symbiotic relationship between mass marketing and mass media. As Ben Thompson put it in a Stratechery post:

The inescapable reality is that TV advertisers are 20th-century companies: built for mass markets, not niches, for brick-and-mortar retailers, not e-commerce. These companies were built on TV, and TV was built on their advertisements, and while they are propping each other up for now, the decline of one will hasten the decline of the other.

As you can see from the chart, viewing of traditional TV by young people in the first quarter of this year (traditionally a high-viewing quarter as many people stay inside during winter) dropped precipitously. There aren’t many mass markets and there really aren’t mass media. Why, then, are we focused on measuring things that are no longer really relevant? Anyone?