Micro media is normal

January is a thinking month, a glorious time of light email and more capacity for my preferred parts of the job. I’ve spent much of the month sorting findings from 40, hour-long, in-depth interviews with an indicative mix of Australians 18+ completed at the end of 2024. It will take a while for that work to make its way to print, but the biggest general findings have redrawn my perceptions of how people live with media now.

The interviews explored how people use media (media defined as anything you read, write, listen to, or play and yes, social and legacy, digital and not), and wow.

1) Use is amazingly deliberate. What is consumed varies a lot, but there are patterns to why and how media are used.

2) Behavior patterns span demographic groups and there are better categories for sorting media consumption (although <~25 year-olds are just a whole different thing, but that young adult use changes markedly around 25).

3) Social media use is mostly private (direct sharing of messages/posts/videos with friends and family) or seeing stuff about your personal media stream – the ~4 things that are interesting to you (e.g. photography, Japan, desserts, Arsenal – I’m serious, they are consistently this wonderfully idiosyncratic).

Media use is driven by personal interest, which is the opposite of what was possible under mass media logics. Despite profound industry change in the last 20 years, very little has deeply reckoned with the collapse of mass media. All of the things that seemed ‘normal’ in the 20th century weren’t; they were just practices that developed that were suited to the conditions and technologies of the time. We need to sort out micro media logics (especially for the video sector which has been most reliant on mass media logics).

Mass-reach media has become an absolute aberration, and the more I dug into trying to quantify this, the clearer it became that very little ‘mid’ media even remains. Most everything is micro media now (consumed by ~<1% of a population*) and we really don’t have many tools that help understand this whether in relation to culture/society or business/industry.

What do I mean by mid and micro media? Watch this space, but it is about scale of reach in a culture, typically nationally. My expertise about US television is deepest – and in that context: mass reach meant at least 30% of households were watching and another 60-70% ‘knew’ about it (because of other coverage across television, newspapers, tabloids, talk radio); mid media is consumed by 5-30% – we’ve called this ‘niche’, maybe half the population ‘knows’ about it; micro media is <5% consuming, but most is <1% now. Maybe 25% of the population are aware, but often high awareness (75%+) in subpopulations (teens; sport fans; news devotees; political junkies, fancy TV watchers) and thus zero awareness in many other subpopulations.

I’m still working on this across other media (e.g. scale was more locally defined for newspapers) but just came across this great work by music expert Mark Mulligan (Mainstream is the New Niche). It is worth the read but he makes the same argument showing that despite the sense many have of Taylor Swift’s vast appeal, only 1.3% of the US population went to an Era’s tour show and though she led global Spotify streams in 2023 with 26.1b, she accounted for just 1.4% of streams.

Media diets full of – though not exclusively – micro media is the new normal. If you do the math, most things regarded as ‘hits’ are ‘mid’ at best. And *. A lot of other media (non video) have had large micro sectors for a long time and likely offer good lessons on micro media logics. The new, and unlikely to abate prevalence of micro media requires a lot of rethinking.

We just won some research funding to do more audience/user studies (focused at the human level, though some nationally representative surveys), so this is where I’ll ‘be’ for the next few years. The work from the past few years will be in print in the next few days/months Media Industries in the Digital Age; After Mass Media: Storytelling for Microaudiences in the Twenty-first Century). I aspire to run a new blog series with the still-developing ideas that support the new audience work by mid-year.

Bonus finding: 4) It’s the recent collapse of linear television that is making it all seem so different (or much harder for those in media) right now. Television continued to operate more frequently as a mid or mass medium, and having at least one medium with scale helped us see more of what those with different interests were consuming (and television has really been mostly mid for the last 20 years). But linear television use among Australians has dropped profoundly (a government survey found it dropped below 50% in 2024 (46% use in past 7 days).

?* ‘Global’ consumption is a fine business metric (when compared with other global data), but we do not ‘live’ globally. Part of why we get confused and think ‘hits’ = mass media is because the metrics have changed.