U.S. adults will spend 21 minutes a day, 6% of their total time with digital media, on Facebook in 2014, but the social network pulls in 10% of U.S. digital advertising spending, according to figures released this week by eMarketer.
That over-indexing stands in direct contrast to all other digital media that eMarketer tracks. For instance, daily time spent on digital devices makes up nearly half of major media consumption, yet only 30.5% of total major media ad spending is on digital channels. Video takes up 15.9% of users’ time and gets 11.7% of spending. Online radio listening checks in at 11.2% time spent and pulls in 4.0% of the cash. Remove Facebook from the mix and the other social media networks take up 11.9% of U.S. adults’ digital time and bring in 3.9% of the ad revenue.
Only Facebook turns those percentages around, according to eMarketer. The comparison with online radio is especially interesting. EMarketer predicts that U.S. adults will spend 7.1% of their time listening to Pandora. That’s a higher consumption rate than Facebook. Granted Pandora listening tends to happen in the background while users are occupied with other matters — like checking their Facebook News Feed — but it’s surprising nevertheless. Not as surprising: digital advertisers will only allocate 1.4% of spending to Pandora this year.
EMarketer’s explanation for the difference:
Several factors contribute to Facebook’s unusual position in the digital environment. For example, Pandora is often on in the background, and users can tune out the ads or simply not hear them. Similarly, while digital video is an engrossing activity, viewers can easily ignore or skip ads, and targeting the right viewers is still challenging for marketers in the nascent medium. On the other hand, Facebook users’ attention is likely to be closely focused on content, where interspersed ads are not so easily ignored (even if users prefer they could be). In addition, Facebook has worked very hard to convince advertisers its audience, customer data and targeting capabilities are the best advertisers can buy, which has contributed to its trending ahead of the market.
Also interesting in the eMarketer results: Facebook remains the overwhelming favorite digital time suck for U.S. adults. The 21-minute daily average was averaged across the full adult population of the country, but eMarketer estimates that only 52.8% of those people — 129.5 million — will access Facebook at least once per month in 2014. Those people will spend 39 minutes per day on Facebook, which is 38.1% of their daily time spent on social networks.
Read the full eMarketer post here.
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