At first glance, many perceive the 5.4% CAGR in US media revenues from 2018 through 2025 as a sign of growth. But looking deeper, a different picture emerges. Adjusting for inflation and increases in population, the industry—including video, audio, social media, print, gaming, and location-based entertainment (LBE)—grew just 0.8% per year. In addition, over the same period, the total amount of time US consumers spent with media on a weekly basis rose from 85.5 hours to 91.4 hours, for a CAGR of less than 1%.
This stagnation has led to a pitched battle for consumers’ attention and consumers’ and advertisers’ budgets. But bargaining power lies with consumers’ first-choice platforms. To understand where consumers are spending their time, where consumers and advertisers are directing their money, and where the profits are accruing, we drew on BCG’s research and surveyed 750 adult consumers across the US. (See “About Our Research.”) Our findings show an industry undergoing significant change as consumers’ viewing, listening, reading, and engagement habits fragment across platforms and modalities.
About Our Research
Media Is the Background Message
Perhaps surprisingly, the growth in the amount of time consumers spend with media has come from an increase in background attention, driven by accelerated multitasking while engaged with audio, video, and social media.
US consumers spent, on average, more than 13 hours per day with media in 2025. But only about 3 hours a day, or 28%, was focused attention. The rest was time spent with media in the background. Overall, focused media attention has declined slightly in recent years, and any growth in one modality comes at the expense of another: 61% of survey respondents said that when they begin spending more time on one media modality, they spend less on another.
Consumers are increasingly multitasking, especially when they are on social media, which has captured 81% of incremental media time since 2018. Multitasking with social media grew from 52% to 55% from 2024 through 2025; those who use social media the most multitask 1.4 times more often when compared with consumers of other modalities. Nevertheless, the proportion of time spent with video, audio, print, gaming, social media, and LBE was remarkably stable, and total active media time remained relatively flat.
Attention Doesn’t Pay Evenly
Although the proportion of consumers’ time spent with different media modalities has been largely stable, the distribution of media revenues has not. That’s because the monetization of various media modalities is shifting. For example, video has commanded about 40% of focused consumer attention each year since 2018, yet it generated only 16% of the industry’s revenue growth from 2018 through 2025—and nearly half of that came from YouTube.
In contrast, consumers’ time spent with social media increased from 8% to 12% of total media time over the same period but generated 40% of the industry’s revenue growth. And though gaming grew from 7% to 9% of consumers’ time spent with media, it delivered 19% of the industry’s growth.
In terms of monetization (which we measured as revenue per hour), LBE is at one extreme, where scarcity and premium pricing produced the highest revenue yield, averaging $3.47 per hour. Print media generated 74 cents per hour, while gaming and social media averaged 70 cents and 69 cents per hour, respectively. In stark contrast, video generated just 39 cents per hour, and audio delivered 19 cents per hour.
Video Profitability May Be Permanently Impaired
While revenues are shifting more dramatically than time spent, profits are moving even more radically. Perhaps the best example is the video business.
The rise of streaming dramatically changed the economics of the media industry. It disrupted the lucrative pay-TV bundle, collapsed the windows that enabled TV and film rights owners to monetize content multiple times, and gave potential moviegoers more reasons to stay home. According to our analysis, profits in the US video value chain declined by $15.6 billion, or 31%, from 2018 through 2025.
Specifically, the greatest declines were in theaters (down $2.2 billion or about 14% a year), cable networks (down $13.8 billion or about 8% a year), and film studios (down $3.8 billion or about 7% a year). While some of the losses in the video value chain were offset by profit growth elsewhere—for example, streaming profits climbed from a $1 billion loss in 2018 to an $8.4 billion profit in 2025—it was hardly enough to make up the difference. It is no longer a subject for debate whether streaming profits will be enough to compensate for profit pressures elsewhere in the value chain. They won’t.
Where to Focus Now
Our research finds that consumers prefer trusted, authentic content driven by scarce intellectual property and communal experiences. “Connection” is the most-cited reason given by survey respondents for choosing live streams over recorded videos, for example.
AI is capable of generating content, and as the technology improves, AI-generated content will likely become even more abundant. And while it’s possible that consumers will soften their views about this content and begin to accept AI as a creative tool, 56% of consumers said they prefer human-generated content.
Even if that percentage decreases over time, what consumers value, and are therefore willing to pay for, may not follow. In fact, it will likely begin to bifurcate. A long tail of inexpensive AI-generated offerings could increase the value of the certified-human tier of content that consumers trust and have an inherently higher willingness to pay for.
Content creators can distinguish their offerings by creating the community, authenticity, and experiences that consumers want, such as bringing viewers together for event-like experiences or making viewers feel part of something bigger than themselves.
For platforms, control over the consumer’s moment of choice can prove ever more valuable. The platforms that build stronger senses of community and consumer relationships—and, therefore, retain the consumer longer—have seen their combined profits grow sevenfold since 2018, with social media platforms generating the dominant share of profit growth, followed by streaming video platforms.
AI has the potential to greatly improve the ability of platforms to match content supply with consumer demand, thereby increasing the amount of time the viewer engages with the platform. The media company that owns the moment of choice owns the customer, regardless of who made the underlying content.
