I Asked Some Teenagers What They Think of Millennial Media
Do teens listen to podcasts or watch live TV? Find out here!
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I have to start by disclaiming that, as a young-millennial, I don’t encounter many teenagers. I see them on the street, in huge, teeming groups of testosterone, and they unnerve my dog. But, in general, people tend not to know the generation directly above or below them. My parents are boomers, my children will be Gen Z 2.0 (or Gen A, if we cycle back round). I don’t encounter Gen Xers or Gen Zers in my day-to-day life.
But how teenagers relate to digital media is so important to how I do business. It’s important, because they will set the tone for the media of the future. Podcasts — my industry — were invented by Gen X, handed down to Millennials, and, via much laborious normalisation work, reverse-migrated back to Boomers. And we see the same process with technologies invented by Millennials: live video streaming, native to Millennials, passed down to Gen Z. And so on.
So what do teenagers think about the things that I am loosely calling ‘Millennial media’? The stuff, that is, that I take for granted. Well, I took to Reddit (so massive self-selection bias alert here) to put together a crack focus group. I trust that they are all *actual* teenagers and not just pretending to be (though, that said, this isn’t my first day on the internet…) and for reasons of not-appearing-too-creepy I didn’t solicit any further demographic details, so don’t know where they are or who they are. All I know is that they are active users of r/AskTeens. So, take my methodology with a pinch of salt, but here’s a rundown of their rather interesting takes.
On podcasting…
First off, I wanted to get their take on whether they listen to podcasts and how they feel about them. I asked about ‘audio-only podcasts’ because I’m aware that, for many teenagers, podcasts have a visual element. But I am a maker of audio-only podcasts and I wanted to see where they lay in the landscape.
I think it’s fair to say that most responses to audio-only podcasts ranged from negative to ambivalent. ‘Audio only gets boring after a bit,’ was one response. ‘Very little people can hold my interest with sound alone,’ said another. A longer response on this theme read: ‘I have listened to some in the past, but I do not listen to podcasts regularly. If I have the time to waste on entertainment, I’d prefer to get the full audio/visual experience. I understand some people like podcasts for when they are doing boring tasks, but I don’t mind silence in cases like these.’
This, it seemed, was a theme — the idea that podcasts are passable if you are doing another activity. ‘Podcasts are a great way to make tasks go by faster (biking, cleaning, exercising),’ said one upbeat respondent. ‘I love listening to podcasts while I’m driving or pretending to do homework. They’re a great way to consume media, often without commercials that make me want to fucking kill myself,’ said another, less upbeat, replier.
Generally, I felt like the teenagers didn’t have much to say on the subject of podcasting. No-one seemed particularly passionate, and only a few podcast brands were mentioned by name. One user supplied the opinion that I think, of all the teens, was probably closest to my own: ‘There’s way too much crap out. If it’s recommended as being good and about something I’m interested in (and without the need to install another app) I’ll probably give it a chance.’
On live broadcasting…
Next, I wanted to ask them about live television and radio. Again, I added a caveat: non-sports. As a Millennial, I’ve drifted out of the habit of watching live TV, though I still consume quite a lot of live radio. But live TV is still the default mental image I have of television. It’s what I was brought up on, and it’s the sketch that my mind would draw if asked “what is TV?”. For teenagers, they’ve had access to Netflix since they were able to get their paws on the remote, so the experience of television must necessarily be different. I started by asking them when was the last time they watched live TV or listened to live radio.
‘The last time I watched live TV was in a hotel in October when that was the only option,’ said one. ‘I can’t remember the last time I watched live-TV. My household has connections for streaming services and if we can’t find a show we want to watch we’ll use our Amazon fire stick,’ said another. The respondent who said they liked podcasts because of the absence of ads said: ‘I never watch television. The last time I watched it by choice was when I was ten watching cartoons at my neighbor’s house. I hate ads, they infuriate me, and cable or over-the-air TV are littered with them.’ And they weren’t the only person to raise complaints against TV advertising (which, I think, is particularly egregious in the US): ‘Honestly it’s been months. I don’t watch TV, there’s too many ads and it feels like a waste of time. I don’t have enough time to waste on watching shows that I’m not interested in.’
One noted a family shift away from TV, saying, ‘Like, sometime in July, however, this is most likely due to the fact that my family hasn’t had a TV set up since 2011,’ whilst another’s considered response was, ‘Hmm, the last time I watched live TV was… 3 years ago? Yeah something around that, ever since my parents and I moved we haven’t bothered getting cable TV anymore.’ Perhaps my favourite response on this question was, ‘I watched live local news TV a couple months ago when my family was in a cabin, and there was nothing else on.’ I like the idea that live television has become synonymous with wilderness retreats.
Generally, people had listened to live radio more recently than they’d watched live TV. The recurring theme here was cars. ‘I do listen to the radio all the time in the car, I can’t be bothered to hook up Spotify playlists every time. Radio is like a free infinite podcast, I hope it never leaves.’
The second part of my question here was whether they see on-demand as the default. ‘I think on-demand will be the default from now on honestly. You see people talking about how they have Netflix, Amazon Prime, Zulu, Disney+… People are treating these things as if each were a channel, and who would want to watch something not-so-interesting when they can watch what they want?’ said one respondent. ‘I think that on-demand is becoming the default and has already for a lot of people my age and around my age (16),’ said another. One had a different perspective: ‘I don’t believe on-demand will be the default. It will be more something in between what radio/TV is right now, and on demand. I rather guess it will be artificially curated per person/family.’ Sounds like r/AskTeens has a media futurologist in their midst…
On internet video…
Internet video doesn’t seem like a very elegant term and I think it does make me sound like a Boomer. But there has to be a term that draws together YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram…etc, all these different functionalities that have a way of showcasing video, whether that’s a 24-hour loop of Baby Shark or a 3-second video of a man falling off a skateboard. I wanted to get a sense of which services are, as the kids say, happenin’, and whether there’s been any change there in the past few years.
Firstly, in terms of the raw figures from the responses. YouTube was overwhelmingly the go-to platform, clocking almost five times as many mentions as the runner-up, Netflix. Almost every respondent mentioned YouTube, which may also indicate a failure in the way I asked the question, or say something about the cross-pollination from YouTube to Reddit. Netflix and TikTok both had multiple mentions, and the other apps referenced were Instagram and Twitch.
So, why does YouTube work so well? ‘YouTube definitely, there’s a lot of good content and you’re supporting smaller creators instead of huge corporations,’ was one answer. ‘YouTube is really all I use, the ads suck but it’s still a massive platform,’ said another. Multiple responses mentioned the smart-TV functionality with YouTube, claiming that they regularly watch videos as a family unit rather than individually on mobile devices or personal computers.
I also wanted to get a sense of how long the videos that people liked watching were, so here’s a quick run through some of the responses: ‘Less than 15 minutes’, ‘I watch short form content, but if it’s not short form anywhere from 15–30 mins I find entertaining’, ‘the majority of videos I watch are around 20–30 minutes’, ‘My dad aims for 10min each video, I’m open to up to 40min’, ‘anything from a 4 minute comedy skit to an hour long video essay, but the most interesting content for me usually hits somewhere between 15 and 45 minutes’, ‘I tend to watch the most videos between 15 and 25 minutes long (however, this is oftentimes at a faster playback speed)’, ‘Depending on how much time I have to kill, 5 to 40 minutes’, ‘the 10 minute standard seems to be the best’, and ‘I watch most things on YouTube in x2 speed because I have a very small attention span, but I can easily watch a 45-minute YouTube video about the fall of some genre of game when I forget to turn the x2 speed on.’
Nick note: I know that a lot of people listen to podcast on 0.5x or more speed, which I myself do occasionally, but hadn’t realise the practice was also common for video. I would’ve thought it totally destroyed the watchability, but clearly what do I know!
A few different people mentioned TikTok, particularly from the perspective of being burned out with the service. This may be to do with the self-selection of my group: they are all Reddit users, and Reddit is, to some extent, the anti-TikTok. It is an aggregation of interesting things for comment, discussion and debate, whereas TikTok is an aggregation of things, both interesting and banal, for quick consumption and little more. ‘I did use TikTok for a few months last year, but I found it very draining and too addictive for my own good,’ one said, while another mentioned that they, ‘tried to use TikTok, but everything I saw seemed so superficial I couldn’t get into it.’
Conclusions
To some extent, I don’t understand teenagers. I am using all the same services on the same devices, but I sense a fundamental buffer in terms of how we use them. I was actually thinking about this just 10 minutes ago, when I was walking the dog and saw groups of school kids streaming out onto the pavement. They were all congregated in small groups of 2 to 5 people, and, in almost all of these groups, some, if not all, of the children had headphones in. Now, for me, I would never countenance having a social interaction while leaving my headphones in (and I’m an audio producer: I have headphones in almost all the time). Do they just leave them in there so that they can put music on when their friends go? Or are they playing music in the background? Or even podcasts? Or radio? Or Twitch streams? Or Bluetooth phone calls with other groups of children? It’s a mystery to me.
One of the biggest questions that faces digital media providers currently is the question of attention span. Are attention spans becoming shorter? It stands to reason that they are. In my parents’ generation, sitting and reading a book for a few hours would’ve been a perfectly reasonable source of entertainment. They would’ve gone for walks and done chores and not expected to have a variety of on-demand audio (though, of course, personal radio, cassettes and then CDs changed this to some extent). The menu is vast now, and it makes sense to sample widely: you wouldn’t go to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet and just bury your plate in chow mein. And yet, I also sense that there is the capacity for huge attention spans, commitment and loyalty here. It’s clear that kids will consume more content from creators they admire than would’ve seemed (or been) possible just a couple of decades ago. Gen Z streamers regularly broadcast for 5+ hours at a time, and Gen Z viewers regularly stay watching for the duration. That doesn’t seem like a short attention span to me.
These questions are complex — too complex for a half-arsed Reddit focus group to enlighten — and will only get more complex. The future is a foreign country, as LP Hartley didn’t say, they’ll do things differently there. Gen Z are yet to invent their own technologies; they are stuck using the framework laid for them by Gen X and Millennials. But I think, if you look closely, you can see in the way that they utilise that pre-built framework, some shadow of what the digital media of the future might look like.
A note on methodology: It’s typical for papers to end with a quick note on methodology. I have approach this in nothing like a sufficiently serious way to truly do this, but if you’re curious, there were 15 respondents to my questions. You can see my questions in full and the full responses on this very interesting Reddit thread, from which the above is synthesised.
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