Is media consumption zero sum?
dangoldin.com
dangoldin.com
Ugh. To heck with GDP, start measuring the happiness of your citizens and doing whatever you can to give everybody a great quality of life.
The reason is simple: we only have so much time in the day. Media consumption takes up a huge part of that. And while an individual's level of media consumption may rise or fall, it's relatively consistent across a large number of people.
I have a hunch the author is stumbling onto the problem of media measurement. Basically, as more forms of media are available, we tend to consume more of them at the same time. For example, in the 80s I may have watched TV while reading the newspaper. As we have added more types of media in the form of mobile, video and games, we just add more potential "double counting" (or even triple counting!) scenarios. Also, many of these usage measures tend to be self-reported; and the more dimensions you have in a self-reporting questionnaire the less accurate the results are likely to be when you add them up (rounding error, poor recall of actual times leading to "proportional" times, etc).
Media measurement is hard. We still haven't figured it out for online advertising, which should arguably be easier than other types of media since we have better mechanisms for measuring things automatically.
Things are moving towards the long tail though, so I do expect to see a continued growth in the variety of media available. But if you want to see a "zero sum" media in action, just consider that the average ratings for "Seinfeld" were 21 million viewers per episode. 20 years later, the most popular show on TV was "Sunday Night Football" with an average of only 13 million viewers. TV ratings have actually been on a steady decline since the 1950s [1]. So if you give people more options, they will watch them -- at the expense of other forms of media. That's a zero-sum market in my book.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_watched_televisio...
Exactly. I sometimes find myself watching a TV series while simultaneously reading and commenting on HN, while simultaneously playing a slow-paced videogame, while simultaneously browsing Facebook and holding several conversations on it. I often try to bundle media that don't overlap cognitively together, like series episode + HN, in order to save time.
But it may be even less than zero sum, because I may decide to turn it all off and go take a walk (and not look at my phone while I'm walking).
The big problem with using media measurement to gauge media consumption is that we can really only measures access, not consumption. The advertising world is built around impressions for that reason; there's an implicit assumption that some percentage of "impressions" will go unnoticed. Measuring that and trying to get your ads in a format where they will be consumed more often when they are shown is pretty much the focus of the entire advertising industry. For a very concrete version of this, think of how DVR users skipping commercials has led to an increase in product placement within shows.
Agreed that measuring consumption is tough - even if it's as simple as measuring an ad view, ad click, and then a purchase you need to take into account everything the customer has seen before. No way to currently measure something like that.
We're going to be stuck in perpetuity with John Wanamaker's: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."
But now we have ad-free internet radio, and subscription services like Netflix, and HBO, and the content has improved considerably. I'm almost filling up my DVR for the first time in 10 years because there's enough good stuff to watch and so few annoying distractions while watching it!
I think the lesson is clear - make high quality content people want and don't constantly interrupt it with annoyances and you'll increase viewership.