Deloitte's 2025 survey found young viewers rank social first

What was announced or recorded

On 25 March 2025, the professional services firm Deloitte published 2025 Digital Media Trends, the nineteenth edition of a survey it commissions annually on US media habits. Deloitte states the fieldwork ran in October 2024 among 3,595 US consumers, with results weighted to recent Census figures. This is a vendor survey, not a metered panel: every figure in it is a respondent's own report of behaviour, gathered once and then published five months later.

What the documents establish

The report states that Generation Z respondents spend 54% more time on social platforms and user-generated video than the average consumer, and 26% less time on TV and film, roughly 50 minutes more and 44 minutes less per day by Deloitte's own framing. It reports that 56% of Gen Z say social media content is more relevant to them than traditional TV and film, that 56% of younger respondents have watched a show or film on a subscription service after hearing about it from a creator online, and that two-thirds of younger respondents use free ad-supported streaming. A companion page, the Digital Media Monitor, describes the underlying programme as a Census-representative survey run every six months among US consumers aged fourteen and over, and states plainly that its figures are 'survey-based data, not measured behavioral data.' That caveat, from Deloitte itself, is the load-bearing fact for anyone citing the headline numbers.

Announced versus delivered

There is no plan-versus-result gap here, because a survey wave is a completed act of measurement, not a promise. The real distinction is between what the questions can show and what they cannot: self-reported minutes are recall estimates, not logged time, and a single US sample says nothing about audiences elsewhere. The finding that younger viewers discover shows through creators before watching them on a subscription service supports a pipeline from short-form clips to paid platforms, but the survey cannot say what share of that discovered viewing ends up as a vertical-drama app purchase rather than a film or a series.

What to watch

Editorially, the number worth tracking across future editions is whether Deloitte starts asking separately about paid short-episode apps, rather than folding them into 'social platforms and user-generated content.' Until it does, a reader cannot isolate vertical drama's share of the behaviour the survey is describing.

• Is a cited figure from a metered panel or a self-report survey, and does the source say so itself?
• Does the sample cover the audience a claim is being applied to, or only US consumers of one age range?
• Does 'social video' in the finding include paid episodic apps, or only ad-funded clip platforms?

Read as what it is, a commissioned annual survey with its own stated caveats, the 2025 edition is good evidence that younger US respondents describe social discovery as central to their viewing; it is not a measured audience count, and it draws no line around vertical drama specifically.