https://www.economist.com/international/2021/07/01/as-lockdowns-lift-media-firms-brace-for-an-attention-recession

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[                    ]
InternationalJul 3rd 2021 edition

Home entertainment
As lockdowns lift, media firms brace for an "attention recession"

People have spent a year glued to screens, but now the attention boom
is turning to bust

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Jul 1st 2021

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"THE NUMBER of people who are in a new size is pretty staggering,"
Chip Bergh, the head of Levi Strauss, admitted in June. After more
than a year of on-and-off lockdowns, the denim-maker told the
Associated Press that a quarter of customers no longer fit in their
jeans.

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The long spell on the sofa may have been bad for the world's
waistlines, but it has been a golden era for the industries that
provide in-home distractions. As entertainment options outside the
home were shut down, and commuting gave way to home-working, people
had time on their hands. Consumption of everything from books and
podcasts to music and video games shot up (see chart).

Now, as vaccines begin to do their job, governments in many rich
countries are starting to lift stay-at-home orders, and people are
venturing back out. Offices are reopening, restaurants are taking
orders and live audiences are back, everywhere from Cannes to
Wimbledon. Our "normalcy index" shows that life in many of the 50
countries included is creeping back to business as usual.

[20210703_i]

As the amount of spare time at home starts to shrink, the attention
boom of 2020 is giving way to what Mark Mulligan of MIDiA Research, a
firm of analysts, dubs an "attention recession". The squeeze on free
time means that media companies are now all asking the same question,
says Brendan Brady of Antenna, a company that measures
video-streaming subscriptions: "Is this now a period of stability? Or
are we going to fall off a cliff?"

Twiddling their thumbs

The average full-time worker gained about 15% more spare time during
the pandemic, according to a survey by MIDiA of consumers in America,
Australia, Britain and Canada. Not only did they have more time, but
those who kept their jobs had more money, too. Americans' spending on
recreation such as sports, theme parks and holidays, fell by 30% in
2020.

Instead, people turned to their screens. In Britain, the time people
spent online last year (including television streaming services) rose
by more than half an hour a day, to nearly five hours, according to
Ofcom, a communications regulator. Being connected became essential.
At the start of the pandemic one in ten British homes lacked internet
access, but since then about half of those have gone online. Seeking
new distractions, smartphone users around the world installed 143bn
new apps, a quarter more than in 2019 (and more than double the
previous year's rate of growth), according to Craig Chapple of Sensor
Tower, which monitors app stores.

The biggest share of the extra screen-time went to television:
video-viewing rose by about 80 minutes a week in rich countries,
finds MIDiA. Video-gaming saw the biggest proportional jump, as
people devoted an extra hour per week, or 30% more time, to games.
Listening to music edged up by 5%, while podcasts and audiobooks rose
by nearly a quarter.

Books of the printed variety also got a boost. In Britain, four out
of ten people reported that they were reading more than they used to,
according to Nielsen, a data firm. The jump was most pronounced among
young people, particularly women, who spent 50% more time reading
than they did before the pandemic. Some of this was escapism, but
much of the reading had a practical motive: cooking and gardening
books were the top choices in non-fiction, while in children's books,
home-learning saw the biggest increase.

As spare time dries up, the question is which of these newly acquired
habits will stick and which will be dropped. In the ultra-competitive
video-streaming market, there are early signs that audiences may be
cutting back. The average number of streaming services used by
viewers in America is falling for the first time, according to Omdia,
a research firm. In April the typical viewer used 7.06 services
(including free ones), down from 7.23 in November. Worldwide, 5m
people signed up to Netflix, the market leader, in the first quarter
of the year, down from 15m in the same period in 2020. Disney+, a
leading rival, also undershot analysts' sign-up forecasts.

Yet the main losers in the attention recession, when it comes to
viewing, will be old-school formats. Cable-viewing in America, long
in decline, rose slightly during the depths of 2020's lockdown. But
reopening has set it sliding faster than ever: by 23% year on year in
the second quarter of 2021, according to MoffettNathanson, a firm of
analysts. Viewership of American broadcast television dropped by the
same amount. And although most cinemas have reopened, the year-long
disruption was enough to persuade film studios to change the way they
do business. Some now release their new blockbusters on their
streaming services on the same date that they make their cinema
debut. The long "theatrical window"--the three months when a new film
could only be seen on big screens--has been permanently cut short (see
Business section).

As well as hastening the switch from old to new formats, covid-19 has
shown how different sorts of media increasingly compete with each
other for consumers' attention. Until a decade ago, people accessed
different media using different hardware: TV sets for video,
computers for gaming, stereos for music. Today all varieties are
delivered by smartphone.

People don't have a specific slot in their schedule for video, says
Emmett Shear, chief executive of Twitch, a live-streaming company.
Instead, "People think about, 'Where am I going to get entertainment?
'... and they go to the service that is providing the most of that." As
lockdowns lift, he adds, Twitch's main competitors will probably be
basketball, frisbee and the park.

The competition between different types of media is clearest in
audio. During the downtime of 2020 people listened to more of
everything, from music to podcasts and audiobooks. But music's share
of overall listening time went down. At the start of the pandemic,
podcasts and audiobooks accounted for a fifth of all listening. By
the end of last year their share had risen to a quarter, says MIDiA.
As listening time returns to pre-pandemic levels, some evidence
suggests that people are sticking with these new choices, and cutting
back on music to make way for them. Spotify said in April that
podcasts had nibbled away at music to reach an all-time high in their
share of customers' total listening.

The rebalancing from music to podcasts suits streaming companies.
Whereas they license most of their music from record companies, which
own the rights to songs, they are increasingly commissioning podcasts
of their own. This gives them both a way to differentiate themselves
from their competitors--"Call Her Daddy" and "The Joe Rogan
Experience" are exclusive to Spotify, for instance--and to increase
their profit margins. Mr Mulligan notes that Amazon has an
opportunity to differentiate its own audio offering by combining
Amazon Music, its music- and podcast-streaming service, with Audible,
its audiobook company.

No obstacles for Roblox

The single biggest new media habit to be formed during the pandemic
appears to be gaming. The extra hour per week that people spent
gaming last year represented the largest percentage increase of any
media category. And unlike other lockdown hobbies, it is showing no
sign of falling away as life gets back to normal. It has become "a
sticky habit", says Craig Chapple of Sensor Tower. He finds that last
year people installed 56.2bn gaming apps, a third more than in 2019
(and three times the rate of increase the previous year). The easing
of lockdowns is not denting the habit: the first quarter of 2021 saw
more installations than any quarter of 2020. Roblox, a sprawling
platform on which people make and share their own basic games,
reported that in the first quarter of this year players spent nearly
10bn hours on the platform, nearly twice as much time as they spent
in the same period in 2020.

[20210703_i]

Gaming's popularity rests most heavily on Generation Z--roughly,
under-25s--who account for most of Roblox's users. A poll in February
by Deloitte, a consultancy, found that whereas all other generations
of Americans named television and films as their favourite form of
home entertainment, Generation Z ranked them last, after video games,
music, web browsing and social media. In time, "the dominant position
that video entertainment has held could be challenged," Deloitte
argues.

The changing shape of post-lockdown life can also be seen through
social media. People spent an extra 40 minutes a week on social
networks last year, as well as an extra half-hour consuming news,
sometimes via social-media platforms. In April this year Facebook
said that the increased levels of engagement it had seen in 2020 were
subsiding as lockdowns eased.

Snapchat, on the other hand, reported the opposite. Evan Spiegel,
chief executive of Snap, the app's developer, told investors that as
lockdowns lifted in America in late February, the amount of content
posted on it increased. Since the end of March, he said, there had
been a rise in the rate of new friendships, as people began to
socialise more in real life. "There doesn't seem to be much concern
that social-media usage will meaningfully erode as economies open
up," notes Michael Nathanson of MoffettNathanson in an analyst's
note. "With people able to meet more in person, it may indeed
increase."

Perhaps the most obvious winner among social networks will be dating
apps. Match Group, which owns several such outfits including Tinder,
reported that new sign-ups fell last year in April, as covid-19
arrived, and again in December, amid the virus's second wave. But now
people seem to be making up for lost time. So far this year sign-ups
are running about 10% higher than they were before the pandemic. In
February nearly 20% more messages were sent than a year earlier. As
people's attention turns from the screen back to real life, Match has
told investors to look forward to a "summer of love". #

Dig deeper

All our stories relating to the pandemic and the vaccines can be
found on our coronavirus hub. You can also listen to The Jab, our
podcast on the race between injections and infections, and find
trackers showing the global roll-out of vaccines, excess deaths by
country and the virus's spread across Europe and America.

A version of this article was published online on June 27th 2021

This article appeared in the International section of the print
edition under the headline "The attention recession"

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