Data across video, audio, and AI shows that consumer attention is deep and habituated, while ad investment is uneven.

The gap between where people spend their time and where marketers spend their dollars is wider than it should be. Understanding where that time actually goes is where coherent strategy has to start.

Streaming won

Subscription streaming has beaten live TV in every major global region. Some 94.8% of North American TV viewers use subscription video on demand (SVOD) versus 87.7% watching live TV, according to an August 2025 report from GWI. The new competition is between streaming platforms trying to grow into social media and social platforms trying to grow into TV, and the outcome will define where video ad dollars flow for years.

YouTube sits at the center of this collision. As our analyst Marisa Jones observed on a recent "Behind the Numbers" episode, YouTube's scale advantage comes from its open architecture.

"Anyone can upload content on YouTube," she said. "It has a breadth of content that pretty much no one can match because anyone can upload anything at any time."

Disney's model makes a smaller number of high-budget projects per year, building one of the most valuable content libraries in history. It doesn't naturally produce the volume an algorithmic feed demands, and one vertical video experiment won't close that gap.

Short-form is where the volume lives now. Globally, internet users spend 6 hours and 45 minutes (6:45) per week with short-form video, more time than they spend with video streaming services (5:04) or music streaming (5:00), according to GWI.

"YouTube itself is emphasizing Shorts as its sort of revenue-generating wave of the future," said our analyst Ethan Cramer-Flood on the same episode. "And that is clearly designed to be social media and to compete with social media, which is somewhat ironic, since everybody else is trying to compete with YouTube on CTV because that actually is probably the higher ceiling."

Every major platform is building toward someone else's territory simultaneously.

Audio's maturing economics

The scale of digital audio is not the problem. North American internet users spend 8 hours and 6 minutes (8:06) per week with music streaming, the highest of any region, and another 2 hours and 51 minutes (2:51) with podcasts, per GWI. Broadcast radio still commands real time, but digital has decisively pulled ahead.

The problem is access. As music streaming's share of ad-reachable listeners has fallen over the last several years, per EMARKETER forecasts, podcasts have picked up the slack. Over 80% (81.7%) of ad-supported digital audio listeners are now podcast listeners, according to EMARKETER. That matters because podcasts carry ads even on ad-free subscription tiers, keeping a meaningful share of the audience within reach.

Total digital audio revenues will hit roughly $23 billion in 2026, but two-thirds of that comes from subscriptions. The platforms have built loyal paying audiences. The tradeoff is that their most engaged listeners are increasingly the least accessible to marketers, the same tension playing out on the video side.

The measurement problem underneath all of it

More formats, more platforms, and more consumer touchpoints have created a measurement gap that marketers haven't fully closed.

Among US brand marketers with first-party data, confidence scores across every measurement dimension sit between 2.0 and 2.5 on a 4-point scale, according to a March report from CIMM and the 4As. Marketers without first-party data score even lower on media performance and brand impact. Attention metrics rank last across the board, at 1.7 and 1.9 respectively.

In a media environment where much consumption happens with eyes off screens and ears half-tuned, that's the dimension that matters most.

AI is expanding the supply

Across every format, AI has lowered the cost of content production. Among US creators, editing is the top AI use case at 24.7%, followed by idea generation at 21.0%, according to a February report from The Influencer Marketing Factory. Creators are using AI to think and produce faster, not just to handle administrative tasks. Niche podcast audiences and micro-focused video channels that weren't economically viable two years ago are now buildable by a single creator with the right tools.

For marketers, the inventory is expanding. The hard part is knowing which of it is actually working. The brands that will win across the next phase of media aren't just the ones buying more formats. They're the ones investing in the measurement infrastructure to understand how attention actually flows across a fractured media day, and building creative that works whether or not a screen is in view.

This was originally featured in the EMARKETER Daily newsletter. For more marketing insights, statistics, and trends, subscribe here.