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In this episode, Carl Mayer sits down with Tess Erickson, Director, Strategy and Research at Involved Media, to discuss the results from the recent Connected Audience Spring 2025 Report on Connected Video and how it compares to earlier reports.
Tess is a research professional dedicated to understanding what drives consumer behavior, from the first spark of interest to the final purchase and beyond. Tess conducts proprietary research focused on filling in the knowledge gaps about the modern media consumer as well as creating and re-evaluating media strategies for new and existing clients. Prior to focusing on media, Tess worked in market research at Ipsos.
Carl Mayer: Welcome to About That. I’m Carl Mayer. Joining me today, for her third time, is Tess Erickson, Director of Research and Strategy at Involved Media an AMS Company.
Thank you for being here again.
Tess Erickson: Thank you for having me again, Carl.
CM: Now you recently just moments ago, hosted a webinar taking everybody through the Connected Audience study for Spring 2025, studying Connected video.
Everybody can check it out with the link that accompanies this, but just to kind of get into some of the topics a little bit, you and I were talking before this episode because we’re cool (Tess laughs) about data, research, the surveys, and some issues you had with those.
Can you tell us about that?
TE: Yeah, my favorite topic. We did end up having some issues with data quality this time that we hadn’t had in previous waves. And you know, that makes a lot of sense. AI has been in the news a lot, and it affected us here too, that we’ve been used to having bots in our surveys. We always do quality checking on our data, but this year we had more bots come into our survey than ever before, and those bots were giving answers that were actually harder to quality check. They were better at giving, for instance, open-ended responses that appropriately fit the question we were asking.
We did our normal quality checking routine, but as we were looking at the data that we got back, we realized that we actually needed to do another layer. We needed to look at a few more logical parameters and logical flags that would be harder for a bot to check. That way we were able to take out a few people.
We did have a slightly smaller sample this time, but it was certainly worth it to make sure that the data quality we got back was what we were used to and that the story that data was telling made sense.
CM: Well, it sounds like a huge pain, but thank you for doing it because it did make that story more reliable. One of the stories that it tells is about SVOD subscriptions, which really have slowed. Some of them have plateaued, but really the story is within that, within those subscribers.
In that case, what’s happening there?
TE: Sure. As you were saying, we have seen some stagnation in terms of overall SVOD viewership. We have seen maturity in the market, that there aren’t a lot of new people trying out SVODs. I mean 95 percent, 96% of our samples have tried SVODs in the past. So there’s not that many people who haven’t tried them to begin with.
But what we do see is other than Peacock, which had a predictable significant decline from our last wave when we just had the Olympics, we didn’t see a lot of movement. We just saw slight non-significant declines in platform reach.
But to match those non significant declines, we actually saw significant increases in these platforms average. So even with Peacock, while there was a 5% decline in platform wage, there was only a 2% decline in average.
We’re seeing that over time. It’s not an overnight process, but over time we are seeing people slowly sign on to the ad supported versions of the platforms, or even that they’re just now using these platforms for more live events or sports.
They’re getting served ads on these platforms in that way as well, which speaks to why Netflix has been a little bit behind a platform like Amazon, Prime, or Hulu because they haven’t been able to incorporate as many live events into their offering yet.
But, that is what we’re primarily seeing, that even though the market is matured in terms of viewership, the ad market is still progressing.
CM: And with that maturity and people kind of falling into their viewing habits, like a lot of data sets, it falls into a bell curve where you have the high viewers, the heavy viewers, and the light viewers on the ends. A lot of the moderate viewers, most of them are in the middle.
But for this study, you paid particular attention to the heavy viewers.
TE: We did. So, you’re right that most viewership, especially for SVOD services, does fall into that bell curve.
The majority of SVOD viewers are watching on a weekly basis. Maybe they’re watching daily, but they’re only watching an hour or two daily. What we see for user generated platforms, specifically YouTube and for linear TV, is they don’t have necessarily a bell curve to their viewership.
They are more likely to be bimodal in that you have a lot of these really extreme high frequency viewers and a lot of people who are maybe logging in for just an event here or there or maybe a tutorial on YouTube that are balancing that out a little bit that are on much lower end.
Whereas when we ran this survey, we wanted to get a lot more detail and a lot better estimation of how much time people are actually spending with those bimodal platforms, where we know that there are a significant percentage of those audiences that are watching more than two hours a day, more than 4 hours a day, maybe even more than that. Maybe that’s our next question.
But that certainly gives us a more clear perspective on the way that these different platforms, viewership habits are different.
CM: Yeah, you kind of read my mind with the next question, which is that you kind of categorized viewers into 4 breakouts, 4 categories. You will do a much better job explaining them than me. So go!
TE: (Tess Laughs) Sure. Yeah, when we looked at all of the data we had about time spent, it didn’t really feel like it was telling the full picture, like it wasn’t telling us that picture about those extreme linear viewers in the way that I was expecting.
What became clear is that we needed to divide out a few different audiences from that total audience to actually understand what an average person’s diet, media diet, could actually look like. Not what the overall time spent, but what an actual person would be doing.
And so we saw 4 main clusters of media behavior. Our first cluster was all about YouTube dominant viewing. These are people that spend by far the plurality of their time on YouTube, that are part of that watching YouTube throughout the day on all of their devices segment. They’re actually the least engaged with SVOD content that is not the way that they are really using digital platforms, which was surprising to me.
I definitely thought all of the streaming video would go together, but instead we had our YouTube group and then we had with a streaming dominate group. So that group, over half of what they’re watching is on SVOD platforms. They’re especially likely to watch things like Disney Plus or HBO Max compared to other groups.
They also are likely to use Hulu as potentially their hub for a number of different services. They do still watch user generated content, but they’re much higher income than your YouTube. So, they can afford to pay for a number of those different SVOD platforms and they’re less free content dependent.
The third group we had was a linear group. We had a group that actually represented what I was looking for when I was looking at linear data. The people that are really heavy linear viewers, this makes up more of their content viewing than any other group that they are loyal to linear to a fault, but they have been getting into fast services which offer sort of a linear experience for free without adding to that cable bill.
And then the fourth group we had is a linear viewing audience as well, but they’re a little higher income than the linear loyals. They’re also a little higher educated and so they have been more able to incorporate SVOD viewing into what they do as well.
They are watching linear content, whether that is through digital or traditional people, but they’re also, and they’re getting what they love out of that, which is morning programming, news programming, talk programming. But they also have added SVOD content, especially from the mainstream established platforms like Netflix and Prime that offer something that they aren’t getting on linear and they have that for their prime time viewing as well.
So that’s a sort of quick overview. Well, there’s definitely much more in the presentation itself. But hopefully with those four groups, you can see them and you can identify with one of them. I do think they give a much easier to visualize representation of who the American media consumer is.
CM: Well, there is a lot more in that presentation. I encourage everybody to check it out, but unfortunately, that’s all the time we have for now to kind of touch the surface with it.
Just some quick housekeeping and some plugs. On June 17th, Tess is going to present the next connected audience study. This will be on gaming. If you want, there’s another one you can watch right now. It’s available on demand. This one is from Danny Senor and it’s another connected audience study. This one is about sports viewership. So check those out, especially one that Tess just did about connected video.
Tess, thanks for being here on About That.
TE: Thanks for having me again, Carl.
CM: Thank you. We’ll see you next time.