A study on media consumption has found that per-capital daily online media intake has soared to more than 4 hours since the coronavirus-driven lockdown, compared with an average 1.5 hours in the pre-shutdown period. Telecom companies have also been reporting over 30 per cent spike in data usage since the nation has been put under the lockdown that began on March 25 to contain the spread of coronavirus COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus, has killed close to 600 in the country and infected close to 19,000. Globally, the deadly pandemic has killed over 1.7 lakh, close to 41,000 of them in the US alone and infected more than 2.4 million, again over 8 lakh of them in the US alone since the virus appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan last November. And, the single biggest beneficiary of this massive spike is YouTube with around 300 billion views in the first quarter of 2020, which is 13 per cent more than in the fourth quarter of 2019 and 11 per cent more than in the first quarter of 2019, according to the study by media buying agency Mindshare and online video intelligence and analytics platform Vidooly. There was a steep increase in content consumption as the time spent by the average user rose to over 4 hours per day since the lockdown from 1.5 hours on social media platforms earlier, showed the survey. As a primary video sharing platform, YouTube alone has garnered over 300 billion views in the first quarter of 2020, up 13 per cent over the fourth quarter of 2019 and a full 11 per cent over the year-ago period, as per the survey. According to the survey, the millennials remain the most-active group on YouTube in the country as 70 per cent of viewership is coming from the 18-34 age group. “Entertainment, music and news are the top-three genres in terms of content consumption contributing to over 70 per cent of views and more than 90 per cent of the views on YouTube are through mobiles,” the survey showed. YouTube has also seen a 20.5 per cent surge in subscribers base since the lockdown was announced, while COVID-related content has surged 98 per cent in terms of views and 199 per cent in terms of engagement. To garner better engagement, brands are indulging in marketing through Facebook and Instagram. Genre-specific observations from the report indicate a 120 per cent spike in the number of uploads in the ‘education’ category after the lockdown. Music, majorly short-form content, has seen a 9 per cent decline in consumption during the lockdown, indicating the shift in consumer behaviour towards long-form content. An increase in time at a consumer’s disposal is cited as the reason for this shift. Other genres that have seen a significant increase in viewership are food and recipe (52 per cent), gaming (23 per cent), and information (42 per cent). According to MA Parthasarathy, chief executive of Mindshare South Asia, through this survey with Vidooly, the company tried to leverage data and digital analytics to understand the shifts in consumer behaviour on content consumption on online media platforms and hopes to use the insights from this study to better serve our clients in crafting relevant, timely and effective content solutions.
