Report: Streaming services push media spending surge
Much of that spending increase was focused on audio/video streaming and gaming soft- and hardware. The global spend hit $2.01 trillion for 2020. Prior to 2020, consumer media spending was increasing at a rate of about 3% per year. For 2021, the experts believe growth will continue at about a 6% YoY increase.
“PQ Media expects the growth of consumer spending on media content and technology will begin to decelerate markedly in 2022 and 2023, as many of the pandemic-driven forces that sparked the atypical end-user spending splurge in 2020 begin to fade in the second half of 2021, as the COVID-19 vaccine rolls out worldwide, adult workers begin returning to office buildings and children start repopulating physical schools,” said PQ Media CEO Patrick Quinn.
Other interesting findings from the report include:
• Digital content devices were responsible for about $440 billion of the consumer media spend
• Digital content subscriptions increased 20% YoY
• 71% of consumer media spending is now for digital content
The medium that didn’t benefit from the increase in spending – traditional film/home video spending. For this category, spending was down about 46% YoY because of the shutdown of movie theatres and the fact that many people weren’t willing to spend $30 to ‘rent’ a new release film at home. According to Quinn, traditional film/video spending will likely never return to it’s pre-2020 levels.
“While we expect to see an uptick in the growth of in-theater movie ticket sales in 2021 and 2022, albeit versus extremely deflated comps in 2020 and 2021 – PQ Media believes that physical movie ticket spending, as well as the entire film & home DVD category, will never again reach the high water mark of nearly $85 billion in 2019,” Quinn said.
More data from PQ Media’s Global Consumer Spending on Media report can be accessed here.
