Marcus Johnson: Hey gang, it's Friday, July 17th. Ethan, Max, and listeners, welcome to Behind the Numbers, an eMarketer podcast. This is the show that keeps you up to date with everything media, marketing, and tech in about 20 minutes or so. I'm Marcus, and joining me for today's conversation, we have with us Principal Forecasting Writer in New York, Ethan Cramer-Flood.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Hello from eMarketer's freezing in-house studio. But I love it.

Marcus Johnson: It's not that bad. Probably is. Principal Social Media Analyst joins us from Philly, Max Willens.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Yo.

Marcus Johnson: There he

Ethan Cramer-Flood: is. Today's- That's how you save time. Good job, Max.

Marcus Johnson: Exactly.

Max Willens: Every second

Ethan Cramer-Flood: counts.

Marcus Johnson: So the world's highest paid athletes during the 2025, 2026 season, um, all sports around the world, who got paid the most? Guesses.

Max Willens: Cristiano Ronaldo? Sa-

Ethan Cramer-Flood: salar- salary or income? Oh, yeah. No. Oh. Well, I got it anyway.

Marcus Johnson: Already beat you. Yeah. You already got it. Sorry. Uh, Cristiano Ronaldo. Um, it, it's overall, it's not just, uh, so it's on the field and off the field earnings.

Marcus Johnson: Right. Cristiano Ronaldo topped all athletes with an estimated $300 million in earnings. The only person above the 200 mark, uh, and roughly $130 million, uh, ahead of second place, boxer Canelo Alvarez. Wow. Uh, Messi was third. Uh, the top 10 list here is Ronaldo, Canelo Alvarez, Lionel Messi, LeBron James, Shohei Ohtani, Steph Curry, Jon Rahm, golf.

Marcus Johnson: Ooh. Hmm. Uh, Karim Benzema, soccer. Uh, KD, Kevin Durant, and then Lewis Hamilton, Formula 1 racer.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: I wonder who has the highest just straight up salary. That might be an NBA player at this point. They're making about 75 million a year for some of these guys.

Marcus Johnson: So, uh, like on-court, uh, on-field earnings?

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Yeah, just your p- just your contracts.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: We- No sponsorships ...

Max Willens: we- Probably still Ronaldo, isn't it? Just 'cause that he plays in that Saudi league that's, like, fake, but, you know, they- Oh, is he still

Ethan Cramer-Flood: doing that? Oh, I

Max Willens: think so.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: But

Marcus Johnson: yeah, his on-field earnings were 235 million. Okay. Off-field was 65. Yeah. Okay. Yes, it's him. Um-

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Oh my

Marcus Johnson: God. Yeah. Steph will make- It's ludicrous

Marcus Johnson: a bit more than KD next year, who will make a little bit more than LeBron. Um, some interesting, um, takeaways from this research. So this is a VisualCapitalist article. Um, they just do brilliant work, and the source is, uh, Forbes. Shohei Ohtani and LeBron James earned more off the field than they did on the field or on the court, um, or on the pitch, on the whatever.

Marcus Johnson: And across last season, 2025-2026, the world's 10 highest paid athletes earned $1.4 billion combined from salaries, prize money, endorsements, appearance fees, licenses, licensing, and business ventures.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Not bad. Eat your vegetables, kids.

Marcus Johnson: I know. Uh, Messi famously turned down a reported, I don't know if you guys saw about it, uh, read about this, $1 billion two-year contract from a Saudi soccer league in 2023.

Marcus Johnson: I knew they were trying to get him. I didn't realize how much money. Uh, choosing to join Inter Miami in Major League Soccer.

Max Willens: I like to think that I can't be bought, but- ... I think if someone offered me a billion dollars for two years of work, I would d- I would fold like a, like a chair. I mean, holy moly. Yeah.

Max Willens: I'm sorry I called it fake earlier. I take everything back. Um- Please call my business manager whenever you are ready.

Marcus Johnson: I love sports, um, but it does seem like a lot to play a game. Like there are registered n- nurses, um, keeping people alive who make 3,000 times less than Ronaldo, and they're like, "Doesn't he just kick a ball around?"

Marcus Johnson: And you're like, "Correct."

Ethan Cramer-Flood: It's kind of bizarre. There are, there are brilliant eMarketer analysts making nowhere near as much money. That's outrageous.

Marcus Johnson: You don't deserve that much, Ethan. That's, that much is true. Anyway, today's real topic, how, uh, time spent with media is changing. All right, we have a new Time Spent with Media report, uh, new research, new numbers from our wonderful forecasting team.

Marcus Johnson: Ethan put some more together in a, uh, delicious little report that tells us all about what's going on with time spent with media online. Uh, Ethan, uh, you're gonna go first. We're gonna talk about some of the main findings from that report, what interested us the most. What jumps out to you?

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Hmm. I mean, this, this is a tough question because what is most interesting to me versus what is the real headline?

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Uh- Oh ... what's interesting to, what is most interesting to me is something- Indeed ... tele- television-related. But let's, let's hit the headline, and then I'll, I'll circle back. Oh, okay. I'll circle back. All right. 'Cause I feel that to, in order to be responsible both to, uh, the ingenuity of my forecasting team and to our audience, I gotta hit the headline, which is that we have debuted a generative AI time spent forecast for the first time.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Uh, so it is, uh, this is unique. I don't think anyone else has this other than us. Um, it, it really helps to situate and contextualize the impact that generative AI is having on the average consumer, the average adult in the US. Uh, and at least from the time spent with media perspective, uh, it's not that high, which I think is an interesting headline.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Uh, so we, uh, according to our analysis, the average adult across the entire population is spending, as of now, about 16 minutes per day with generative AI, na- native generative AI chatbots or platforms. Um, active users, those who, uh, you know, that, that, the 60-minute-a-day number incorporates the, you know, multi-hundred million people who are still not participating in AI, so that's a whole lot of zeros in the math.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: If we count only those people that have jumped on board and are using AI, it's up over half an hour a day, which is, you know, both of those numbers are meaningful, um, but they are small in the grand scheme of our time spent with media overall forecast, which finds that we as Americans spend well over 13 hours a day with media.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Um, so 16 minutes doesn't account for much, and in fact, that is dead last, uh, among the activities that we break out.

Max Willens: Mm.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: That said, it's growing quickly. Yes. Huge, huge growth. So I'm not here just to say, oh, pish posh, there's nothing going on here, nothing to see here. There is something to see here. It's by far the fastest-growing screen time activity that we track, or media activity that we track, internet activity.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Uh, but it is still pretty small at this point. Um, and so that's the headline. But

Marcus Johnson: growing, I... See, Max, I wonder what your take is here, 'cause when w- um, Ethan's right, it's, it's, when you rank it by activity, it's not high, um, at all. It's at the bottom. But when you look at the, the number of minutes, and let's take the users for a second, even just across the population, but let's take users.

Marcus Johnson: Half an hour a day, and with, with what we're saying here, Ethan, here, Ethan, is that Google's AI overviews don't count, right? We're just talking about native AI platforms.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Correct. Incid- Half an hour- ... incidental, incidental interactions with AI where, where something spits an AI answer out at you that you weren't really, uh, we did not count those, correct.

Marcus Johnson: Yeah. So spending half an hour a day having a back and forth with, with AI platforms, Max, I actually think that's, that's quite meaningful.

Max Willens: Yeah, and I think that you hit on the reason why it's so meaningful, Marcus, which is the fact that this is, unlike a lot of the other stuff that's, um, toted up in this forecast, this is active, engaged- Mm-hmm

Max Willens: you know, time with, uh, a, a kind of technology, right? This isn't just kind of like, you know, sinking into your couch, uh, watching television or, you know, having a podcast on while you are doing the dishes. This is, you know, actively conversing with or pushing, uh, this AI to help you create something, to work on something.

Max Willens: And the reas- there's a lot of reasons that this is important, right? Like, so one of them is that- it kind of affirms the value of, uh, it as a potential advertising surface because you've got people that are really leaned in, um, that are really kind of engaged and who are theoretically being served advertising that's highly relevant to people at a moment when they're really deeply engaged with something.

Marcus Johnson: Yeah.

Max Willens: Great point. And it also too, like, is something that is not easily replicated in other s- in other spaces, right? So, like, obviously there's, uh, you know, time spent with search, there's time spent, uh, gaming. I, I think a lot- it's important to remember that a lot of people do fundamentally use AI as a sort of, not a toy, but a, a way to amuse themselves, right?

Max Willens: Like they sort of- Mm-hmm ... uh, entertain themselves using it. And so it's, in addition to being incremental, uh, and sort of n- new time spent against an already surreal amount of time spent engaging with media. It's also kind of novel engagement and novel time spent, and so that's one of the, you know, just two more entries on a really, really long list of why m- marketers and advertisers are really obsessing over, over AI and the role that it's taking in our lives.

Marcus Johnson: Yeah. Um, Ethan, I thought this is a brilliant point you, um, uh, indicated in the, in the research, which is desktop and laptop usage- Mm ... also getting a bump, um- Yeah ... because-

Ethan Cramer-Flood: That was almost an unexpected finding, or a finding that we had to back our way into, in as much as desktop l- desk- top, laptop, or just let's just say computer time spent has been declining for really 15 years.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Uh, if you think about how, how much time we all just either spend on the couch in front of a big TV or scrolling our smartphones, computers are an afterthought. Sure, we all spend a lot of time in them at work, but most of that, or a large chunk of that wouldn't count in this. But in terms of the media, internet-connected, uh, browsing activity or anything that we would count for time spent with media, um, it's just been going down, down, down, down almost like an hour a day.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Uh, and then all of a sudden two or three years ago, uh, it started to tick back up again. And we didn't really remark upon it at the beginning, uh, but now after several years of, of computer time spent growth, it's like, "Oh, we know what's happening here." "This is pretty obvious." Yeah. Because there's this brand-new factor in screen time- Yeah

Ethan Cramer-Flood: generative AI, that overwhelmingly is more useful and more convenient to use on a computer. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Which is like there hasn't been a storyline like that in a really, really long time, right? Most- Right ... most new stuff is either on your CTV or it's on your smartphone. Suddenly we have something new- Right

Ethan Cramer-Flood: that's, that's for a computer screen. So yeah, good news for those device makers.

Marcus Johnson: ChatGPT was launched, and, uh, yeah, you start to see this turnaround almost immediately. Um, all right, Max, what jumped out to you, uh, from the report?

Max Willens: Well, I, I hate to be, uh, you know, sort of so closely aligned with my own, uh, book of business or coverage areas, but I was, I was struck by what, uh, our forecasting team found when it came to time spent with social media, right?

Max Willens: Mm-hmm. So one of the sort of, uh, imp- most important stories around social media over the last couple of years has been the, uh, projected sort of plateauing of time spent on the, on these social networks, right? So the, there was this, there had been this kind of steadily upward trend that we'd been able to chart for many, many years, uh, followed by a, a pretty s- marked spike during the pandemic for obvious reasons, right?

Max Willens: We basically couldn't go anywhere, and, you know, when everybody ran out of Netflix or tired of watching, you know, people play shuffleboard on ESPN, they just thought, "Well, I guess I'll just look at TikTok more," or, you know, spend more time on Instagram. And so there was this gigantic spike, and then it looked for really several years afterward like we had sort of finally reached the top of people saying- I cannot scroll anymore.

Max Willens: And that had really, really immense implications for the, you know, ad prospects for a lot of the social networks, and also just frankly how we thought about the digital landscape. But, you know, as you look at these numbers, um, it really just kind of proves out a couple of different things that have been sort of bubbling under the surface of the conversation around social.

Max Willens: One is the sort of like proof that Short-form video has really become a very important kind of component of our, everybody's media diets, right? Like, this isn't just people, you know, finding TikTok and getting stuck on it and, and thinking, "Oh, I'll, you know, I, this is an, a, a kind of core component." This is proof that people like this kind of content across Meta's devices, across, um, you know, Snapchat, on Pinterest.

Max Willens: Um, Reddit is currently working feverishly to try to figure out how to incorporate more video into its own experiences. And so that, I think, is a, a really, really key component of this. And the other one is, is frankly related to shopping. I mean, uh, here again, I think TikTok deserves a, a huge chunk of credit for sort of proving out, uh, that people like the idea of buying stuff, uh, while they're using social media.

Max Willens: And I think that as we look into the sort of near-term future, w- we're going to sort of see this kind of continued expansion because the social networks are all in their own kind of distinct ways leaning into making themselves more valuable parts of the consumer purchase journey. Sometimes it's in sort of helping people figure out, you know, what kind of product is, is best, you know, turning to Reddit to say, you know, "I'm trying to decide between, you know, these two pairs of headphones.

Max Willens: Which one is better?" Or, you know, looking to Pinterest when you're thinking, "I wanna remodel my kitchen. I don't know how or why or what that's going to look like, but I gotta start somewhere." And so they, they pop open Pinterest or, you know, uh, Instagram kind of pr- continuing to expand its own use in, in terms of shopping and also just its ad product continuing to prove that it can kind of introduce people to something that they, they wanna buy on the spot.

Max Willens: So-

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Mm-hmm ...

Max Willens: I, I was just, you know, even though it's something that I think I and colleagues have been wondering about for a while, it was, uh, it was really interesting to see those, uh, questions sort of answered, uh, in Ethan's forecast.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Yeah. I mean, wouldn't it- Yeah ... have been great if we had actually been right and at that peak we called it.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: We were like, "The peak is coming, and then there's gonna be a slow decline." I remember saying that a couple years ago, and everyone was- Yeah ... everyone was very excited. They were like, "That's great news."

Marcus Johnson: Yeah.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Our society- Yeah ... is heading in the right direction finally.

Marcus Johnson: When I read-

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Nope, we were wrong. That did not happen.

Max Willens: Incorrect.

Marcus Johnson: When I read that part of the research, I was like, hang on a second. I, I thought that, that wasn't necessarily the case. Ethan, when you and the team were reviewing this, is there anything else apart from what Max said that kind of jumped out to you as to, as to why, uh, it's still going up and is, uh, kind of- Yeah

Marcus Johnson: like the-

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Uh, everything he said is exactly spot on. I mean, it would just... If you'd, if you'd drill down under the numbers, there are really two specific precise stories and mathematically in terms of why, you know, what something that could have been flatlining is not flatlining, and that's really, it's Facebook and TikTok.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: So we had the, we had the story there that kinda was true for a little while a couple, a few years ago that Facebook isn't cool anymore. Facebook is, uh, losing engagement. People don't go- people hardly ever check in, and when they do check in, they're spending less time. Um, and that just has changed. That, you know, he's turned it around.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: They figured it out. I mean, I'm not saying Facebook is cool now, but, uh, their engagement challenges seem to have been resolved, and instead of being a drag on the top-line numbers, it just isn't. I mean, Instagram, Instagram has always been-- Instagram never really had a, a bump in the road. They were flying.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Right. But Facebook was not flying, and so it was starting to be a drag, and then it just stopped being a drag. And then the other one was TikTok fatigue, TikTok political issues. You know, TikTok wa- was a big part of the growth story for a long time, and that, that also really did sorta hit a bump in the road as society both, uh, there, there was-- It felt like people were getting sick of TikTok, and then there was also the possibility of the ban.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Um, and that went away. And maybe, maybe Max hit on it when, in terms of TikTok has also changed, you know, their emphasis on shopping. It's sort of a different experience for some folks now. Mm-hmm. But the TikTok fatigue thing kinda, they just kinda got past it, and obviously the political problems are in the rearview mirror, too.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: So those two- Yeah ... major, major players shifting their fortunes kind of explains, and mathematically explains the top-line number going from- Okay ... sort of plateauing to, to just continuing to accelerate, or not accelerate- Yeah ... but continuing to grow.

Marcus Johnson: Yeah. Um, all right. We've got time for one more. Ethan, back to you.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Oh, the, the other one that I teased? Yeah. So for me, um, even though, uh, you know, gen AI, gen AI debut was the headline, understandably, I thought our television, um, sort of insights or the, the, the results that we were able to detect for traditional TV and with it a sort of new converged TV data point were pretty interesting.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Uh, TV Good old-fashioned linear traditional TV is not doing as bad as it once was. How's that for a headline? So let me, let me be clear, television is still declining. Television is still losing viewers, and it is still losing engagement and l- and it is losing time spent per day, the traditional TV.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: However, it is slowing much-- it is declining much, much more slowly than it once was. Not quite, you know, sort of plateauing, but it is, it's, it's barely, it's just sort of a f- in a feather fall now. And we think a lot of that has to do with the enduring strength of broadcast TV, and particularly live sports on broadcast TV.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: So while the cord-cutting phenomenon has not stopped at all and cable TV is in big trouble, the broadcast networks kind of aren't. Uh, they seem to be doing okay, or at least that is the explanation that we have come up with for as to why, uh, TV in general is not doing nearly so bad as it was before.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: There seems to be a very, very long shelf life for regular broadcast TV going forward. Um, and then that in turn feeds into another new data point that I think, uh, mark- the marketing world in general is, is sort of coming around to the idea that traditional linear TV and digital connected TV, CTV, are sort, sort of two sides of the same coin, and it's become more appropriate to sort of look at them together now as just, it's just the big screen in the living room.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: It's just what we all do when we sit on the couch, and we're just consuming this big screen. And whether we're doing it in some sort of traditional over-the-air or on some cable network, or more likely streaming, it's just kind of the, it's increasingly the same experience both for the consumer and for advertisers.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Um, and that figure is enormous. It's well over five hours a day. And in fact, uh, now that we're sort of calculating it that way, rather than considering TV and CTV competitors, they're just sort of two sides of the same coin, um, the big screen living room still, uh, commands more time per day than our smartphones do.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Which is not really— You know, we, we think of, uh, uh, we think of mobile phones, smartphones as being so utterly dominant in every facet of our lives. But actually, that big screen living room is more dominant, and it, it is, it is solidly ahead, and it will remain ahead for a long time. So that was- Yeah ... that was the one that, that jumped out to me.

Marcus Johnson: Yeah, 40 minutes more time on the converged TV, traditional plus that CTV, um, than mobile this year, and as Ethan alluded to, um, still ahead in a couple of years' time. Still half an hour more with that television, however it's getting, the content's getting delivered, uh, with TV than mobile, half an hour more, um, in a couple of years' time.

Marcus Johnson: Max, anything, uh, about this trend that jumped out to you?

Max Willens: No, I, I think that, uh, Ethan's right to highlight it. I, to me, it, the first thing it ha- made me think of was just the sort of durability of sports, which is a topic that's been- Mm-hmm ... you know, practically beaten to death at this point. But, like, that's also something that, that gets, uh, kind of unpacked for the first time in this report.

Max Willens: And, um, I, it is really just kind of astonishing when you look at it, right? I mean, like, I think the, the time spent, uh, with sports television essentially has dropped ever so slightly, but I feel like most of that decline can be attributed to, to second screening, right? Like, a lot of the, the top line number in this report is due to, to second screening or sort of multi, uh, media-ing.

Max Willens: I don't- there's probably a more elegant term for it than that. But-

Marcus Johnson: Nailed

Max Willens: it ... you know, I, I think all the time about, you know, I'm now probably a decade into, you know, watching, uh, basketball games with, you know, uh, my phone in my hand toggling between, you know, a, an X list and a, a Discord server where I, you know, follow along to people, uh, living and dying with, you know, whatever Jalen Brunson is doing.

Max Willens: And I, it's just, it's really interesting to think about how dependable that is and, and how valuable that makes, uh, sports as a kind of content category. Mm. Um, you know, one of the things that's gonna be really fascinating to watch over the next several years is just how aggressively the sort of CTV and streaming players go after sports media rights.

Max Willens: So, you know, whether that's the World Cup or the NFL, which, you know, is l- likely to sort of rip up the media rights deals that it has, uh, in light of the Warner Brothers, uh, Paramount merger. Mm-hmm. And I just think that the, where that goes and, and what happens there is going to be really, really interesting to watch over the next couple of years.

Marcus Johnson: Mm-hmm. Um, Ross has a hot take on sports viewership, uh, which will be out, uh, he'll be talking about that on the Monday episode, so, uh, tune into that. Um, yeah, it's, I- traditional media is stubborn. Um, because if you break out the, the 13 and a half hours we spend with media, um, every day, that Ethan mentioned at the top of the show, about nine and a half of that is digital, which means that somehow traditional still has four hours, and in two years' time will have a little under four hours.

Marcus Johnson: And a big part of that is the TV story, but just, yeah, traditional media's resilience,

Ethan Cramer-Flood: shining. Shout, yo, shout out radio. Here we are on a, on an audio format. Hello. I mean, it, we're, we're on an audio format that's become a visual format, but we are on an audio format. Radio's still getting almost an hour and 20 minutes a day.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Radio, traditional radio. Wow. Hour and 20.

Marcus Johnson: Get after it.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: You know? Digital, digital audio, more than that. But, uh, yeah, to your point, I mean, this stuff doesn't go away.

Marcus Johnson: Mm-mm. Nope. Um, but we have to. We'll play with

Ethan Cramer-Flood: this. Oh, there you go.

Marcus Johnson: Come on. That's why you make the big bucks. That's why you pay me those medium ones.

Marcus Johnson: Uh, thank you so much to my guests for today. Thank you so much to Ethan.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Oh, I can't top that outro. You win. Have a good night.

Marcus Johnson: Of course. Thank you to Max.

Max Willens: Always a pleasure, Marcus. Thank you.

Marcus Johnson: Yes, indeed, gentlemen. Uh, thanks to the production crew. Uh, we have John and, uh, some mysterious person in the background who I wasn't told who it was.

Marcus Johnson: Who was in the background? Who else is in the studio, Ethan? Oh

Max Willens: my God, he's got a knife.

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Uh, I, I saw Lance. I saw Danny. Uh, uh, Mike.

Marcus Johnson: Oh, everyone's in. I saw

Ethan Cramer-Flood: Mike.

Marcus Johnson: Mike's there too. The whole crew. Everyone but Stewart, and, uh, that's it actually. Just Stewart, who runs the team, not helping out with this one.

Marcus Johnson: Unforgivable. Uh, thank you so much to people who listened in to this episode of Behind the Numbers: The Marketer Podcast. We're back on Monday, peering into the future. Uh, as I mentioned, Ross will be with us for our What If episode. Until then, happiest of weekends.