Have you been posting more or less on social media during COVID-19? Is this shifting consummers attention towards Netflix? Will this be a problem for brands? This is what I asked myself right after the lockdown ended. Myself as most of you spent those days streaming Netflix shows and learning new skills that I wanted to learn for a long time and that was a perfect time for it. Although, the opposite of what it seems, I had less free time than a regular day (pre-pandemic).
Before jumping into any conclusions, I asked over 50 of the people I know, and the results were exactly how I imagined they would be. The great majority of the survey respondents (77%) agreed they posted less than what they used to in the pre-pandemic-world, leaving just a marginal 23% of them with the opposite answer.
(77%) agreed they posted less than what they used to in the pre-pandemic-world
This can affect negatively social network companies such as Facebook or Twitter since over 95 percent of their revenue comes from advertising (Statista, 2020).
This happened when most of us spent most of our time in front of screens, but our activity shifted from showing our lives (back then not really interesting) to consuming other people and companies’ content such as Netflix. Even popular creators have paused their main activity during the lockdown months, which lowers the content production by a lot. So, as you see individuals’ content production has dropped a lot, while entertainment companies’ content consumption has skyrocketed.
Streaming companies have seen a decline in their revenue only because of companies’ marketing budget cuts and consumers’ subscription cancelations, but in the case of companies like Netflix or Spotify, the decline has been momentary, since people have streamed more content than ever before, during lockdown.
Therefore, this creates a dilemma, since the same people who have been creating less content have been streaming more commercial content, which is limited. This means that there is less new content available in the market, which would have to raise this content’s price because of the increasing content demand and the decreasing content production. Although these companies are using a containing strategy to gain more customers by keeping their prices low and releasing pre-filmed shows. So, as you see here, the content crown has passed to the Entertainment Corporations and has left Social Media Consumers.
the content crown has passed to the Entertainment Corporations and has left Social Media Consumers.
If this does not change back to the way it used to be, it could be a big problem for the big social networks but most importantly for any brand that wants to advertise itself on them, since right now there is not as much attention there, instead, it is on Netflix, Disney + HBO…, which are ad-free.
To conclude, we have created less content than ever before, probably because our lives were just boring at that point of time, but we have been streaming more TV shows than ever, which creates a dilemma for any brand that wants to advertise itself on social media since the attention has shifted towards the big commercial streaming platforms.
Clement, J. (2020, August 10). Facebook: Quarterly segment revenue 2020. Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/277963/facebooks-quarterly-global-revenue-by-segment/