2023: Media’s Year Of Living Dangerously
TVREV is happy to announce the first fruit of our 2023 collaboration with Evan Shapiro and PCH’s consumer insights team.
It’s a study called 2023: Media’s Year of Living Dangerously which you can download here for free.
To give you a taste of what is in the study and some of the very surprising conclusions it reached, we sat down with Evan Shapiro and Smriti Sharma, who is the Head of Consumer Insights at PCH.
ALAN WOLK (AW): Let’s start out first by explaining how Publishers Clearing House or PCH came to be in the consumer insights business, and what size database we’re looking at for this report.
SMRITI SHARMA (SS): Our business has evolved a lot over the past 70 years. Two years ago when we saw that cookies were going away, we realized we had a lot of first party data and so we started digging into what we could do to leverage it. Which is how we decided to start up our consumer insights business.
Right now, we have 54 million users available—22 million on platform and then another 32 million off platform. We also have 5,000 different attributes we assign to our users so that we are able to divide the users into different groups in order to satisfy various industries. It’s a good mix.
For this particular report we had 42,000 respondents and then we reweighted it to align with census data, so we wound up with 27,085 total respondents in the weighted version of the survey.
Evan Shapiro(ES): For comparison we have about 10X the number of respondents you normally see in media studies. It’s such a rich set of clay to use to create these studies. There are enough respondents that you can say “this isn’t just directional, it’s actually kind of reliable.”
SS: And these are real people too—they’ve signed up for a sweepstakes, so they’re using their real names and real addresses.
ES: That’s something we can’t convey strongly enough. Because the danger with a lot of third party surveys is that they're scraping social media which we know is filled with bots. These are actual human beings with actual physical addresses
AW: Turning to the actual results of the survey, what would you say is the single most surprising result.
ES: By far the biggest surprise—a shock really—was that only seven percent of respondents said that they were planning to stick with all of the subscriptions they currently have today. Which means that 93 percent of them are planning to do some sort of switching.
SS: These are all sorts of media-related subscriptions too, not just TV. We asked about music subscriptions, gaming, sports and news too.
ES: The other piece that is notable is that stat held true across all ages and incomes. There was some variation, but not a lot—it ranged from a low of 5 percent of those over 55 saying they were staying put, to a high of 11 percent of 35-54 year olds saying they were keeping all their subscriptions. So it’s not as if all that churn is going to be centered around any particular group.
AW: That is indeed a surprising number. Not to mention a scary one for the media companies selling those subscriptions. What did you see as some of the big takeaways?
SS: I think it means that the people selling the content are going to have to work a little harder to keep their subscribers in place, to give them the content they want along with exclusive offers that will make them want to stay put.
ES: There’s another piece of that too: look at the 59% who say either they're going to cut subscriptions to the bare necessities, or switch to fewer services or switch as needed based on what programming is on each service.
My takeaway from that is there is going to be a great culling of services throughout all the various types of media. Because this behavior cuts across all demographic and income groups, not just not just the youngest respondents or lowest income groups.
AW: That was what was interesting to me—that across the board, the responses to all the survey questions were fairly consistent across all age and income groups. Is that unusual?
ES: Very unusual. It has not been true on other work we’ve done. When you ask people if they are willing to pay to watch sports on TV, for example, you see substantially higher numbers among people with higher incomes, same thing for older and younger and paying for sports—young people don't really want to do it. Older people are much more okay with paying for news too. Conversely, younger people are much more willing to pay for music whereas older people are not.
AW: Were there any other surprising stats from this, maybe something that can help media companies sleep better at night?
SS: I thought that the data about ads was just as surprising, the fact that there are so many people who don’t mind watching ads on TV. I think from a market perspective, this is a very big opportunity to capitalize on— the fact that 41% of the market really doesn't have a strong preference on whether there are ads in their content.
ES: I absolutely agree. I think there's this misperception that people are always going to pay to avoid ads. It's not that they love ads, it's just that if they can get a better deal and pay a little less to get ads, okay, fine.
ALAN WOLK: Can you expand on that—was there any particular type of content people were okay with seeing ads on?
ES: Yes. That was another big takeaway: people’s comfort with seeing ads varied tremendously depending on the type of content. Kid’s content, for instance, was verboten. People seem okay with ads in news and sports and younger viewers seem okay with ads in their music service—I blame that one on Spotify. But for news and sports on TV, there doesn’t seem to be much variation among demographics.
SS: Sports is actually a perfect example. People are used to seeing ads in live sporting events on TV. Think of the Super Bowl: people actually watch it for the ads almost as much as the game.
AW: So any thoughts on what media companies might do to avoid being swept away by the massive wave of churn that seems to be heading their way?
ES: Churn is now the way to change channels. And it is a dramatic shift in your business model. If you do not have the sort of programming that keeps viewers around on a daily basis, or makes them check in multiple times per week, you're going to lose that subscriber, they're just going to go away.
SS: Limited time memberships are another option: let me sign up to just watch a specific show or category of shows and I might stick with you and even move to a full subscription.
