The first complete view of Australia’s video consumption habits

Facebook Business

July 22, 2019

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Five years ago it was pretty much unheard of for people to stream video on their mobiles, the meagre data allowances and connections meant it just wasn’t feasible for most people as a habit.

But take a look around on your next commute and you will see a good number of people catching up on their favourite show on a streaming service or looking at videos from friends and creators on their social feeds. For many the commute has become an extension of their consumption time.

For anyone looking to promote their business, video is an essential tool. It creates emotional connections, engages audiences and allows you to build followings.

When you think about buying your ad placements there are three things critical to success, an equation which will deliver the most value for your dollars: reach (how many people you can speak to) + low wastage (minimising the amount of non-target audience you speak to) + frequency (how many times you speak to them, and what times of day).

It’s easy to underestimate the impact the rise of streaming services like Netflix have had on the way people consume video, and where you should be buying it.

There is no single-source of truth in the media landscape showing us where people are spending their time consuming content, or how engaged they are. So we decided to find out for ourselves, and commissioned PwC to conduct extensive consumer research into the entire Australian video landscape.

The results of the My Screen: Australian Video Consumption report show it may well be time for marketers to look again at some basic assumptions.

Here are a handful of the key takeaways.

1. Streaming platforms are taking away commercial video hours

Netflix is now the fourth biggest video channel in Australia, with 11.3m  Roy Morgan, March 19, 2019, ’Netflix surges beyond 11 million users in Australia’, www.roymorgan.com users. While it comes behind commercially-funded platforms like TV (17.3m  Roy Morgan Single Source, December 2018 Database, Watched TV in Last 7 Days, P14+ ), Facebook (17.3m Nielsen Digital Panel, Standard Metrics, February ratings, monthly, P14+ ) and YouTube (16.6m2) users, it means around half of the population is now consuming at least some content in places they can’t be targeted with advertising. Since Netflix launched five years ago audiences for commercial TV are down 17% in five years  Source: ozTAM—Average monthly reach.

So whilst people may be watching more video, they are on average watching less of it on commercial TV, especially younger audiences. Creating reach through this channel may not be the most effective method any more.

2. BVOD is not a genuine competitor to SVOD in terms of audience

Commercial TV networks have worked hard to create their own BVOD (broadcast video on demand) catch up services. We wanted to understand who the people using these services were.

The report reveals there is a huge overlap between audiences watching linear TV channels and BVOD programming - at least 75% on average. This means if advertisers are buying ads in linear TV programming they are not achieving much incremental reach buying ads in BVOD as well.

For comparison, the deduplicated audience respectively of Facebook (17.3m Nielsen Digital Panel, Standard Metrics, February ratings, monthly, P14+ ), YouTube (16.5m Nielsen Digital Panel, Standard Metrics, February ratings, monthly, P14+ ) and Instagram (11.1m Nielsen Digital Panel, Standard Metrics, February ratings, monthly, P14+ ) dwarves the largest deduplicated BVOD audience, which is 9Now (2.8m  Nielsen Digital Panel, Duplication Report, Unduplicated Audience 7plus, 9Now, 10 play, SBS On Demand, ABC iview, February ratings, monthly, P14+ ).

And when it comes to the content people are when seeking it out BVOD struggles to compete with SVOD as well, with two of the three most popular genres, drama and comedy, viewed as the domain of the SVOD platforms, making them preferred destinations.

Similarly the depth of content is a massive driver for audiences in terms of perceiving a service as high quality, with SVOD platforms leading on this metric as well. Interestingly, being ad free was third on the list when it came to how people think about the quality of platforms.

3. Shifts are happening across all age groups

The idea that it’s just younger people who are migrating their viewing habits is definitely not the case, these new platforms are having an impact across all age-groups.

Facebook is the most widely-used video platform amongst under 55s, and the second most-used in over 55s (behind free-to-air TV), while YouTube is in the top three for each age group as well.

Free-to-air TV is only the fifth most-used platform amongst under 35s.

These are just a few of the key insights in the report, which throws up some fundamental questions about the way media is being planned and bought today. We hope you enjoy taking a deeper dive into this world first research.

Tags

Insights Measurement FYI Strategy