millennials

It’s wrong to think of them all as one group. They’re actually four distinct cohorts, and all want to be engaged, says a new research report. Here they are: Students, stables, parents and flexes.

TiVo research from October 2015 shows that 34% of millennials polled like streaming full TV shows more than any other kind of content. Another 18% prefer full-length movies, while music videos take third place with 12%.

The key to legacy news organizations reaching the coveted digital demo is to put their content where young people will find it, primarily social media. Even then, however, they must create content that resonates on particular platforms within social media.

Millennials still watch a lot of traditional network and cable TV shows — just increasingly not on traditional linear TV. Yet many viewers aren’t ready to cut the traditional TV cord.

A new study by Symphony Advanced Media using cross-media measurement  data offers mid-fall season insights about millennial viewing, platform preferences and inaccuracies in legacy currency ratings.

Millennials are one of the most sought-after audiences in media, so it’s no wonder advertisers are spending the majority of their budgets targeting the young group. What is surprising, is how much more they’re willing to go above and beyond–advertisers spend 500 percent more on Millennials versus other groups, according to an infographic from the marketing technology company Turn.

No wonder advertisers struggle to understand them. They’re professed cheapos yet blow wads on tech. They prefer to buy local but are major online shoppers.

Advertisers have left no platform unturned in their quest to find and reach linear-TV-phobic millennials. And now they’ve turned to a surprising place: syndicated television. TV syndication studio Twentieth Television, which is home to eight of the top 10 syndicated shows among adults ages 18-34, has spent the last two years meeting with clients to emphasize syndication’s overlooked success in reaching those oh-so-prized millennial viewers.

Millennials might be more inclined to subscribe to pay television services if their current (or potential) providers were to make a more concerted effort to demonstrate how the services can be used anywhere, on any device, according to research from strategy consulting firm Altman Vilandrie & Co.

A recent Nielsen global survey found that trust levels in advertising have remained fairly consistent across earned, owned and paid formats over the past two years. Millennials (age 21-34), who came of age with the Internet, have the highest levels of trust in online and mobile formats. While that may not come as a surprise, it’s not just online and mobile advertising formats where millennials exceed the average. They also show the highest levels of trust in 18 of 19 advertising formats/channels, including TV, newspapers and magazines.

Facebook has been going hard after marketers’ TV budgets, and with some success. Now, it’s coming armed with research from Nielsen suggesting it’s a better reach medium than TV for millennials and Hispanics coveted by so many marketers

Verizon Communications is hoping that millennials will start flipping their mobile phones 90 degrees and streaming live and on-demand television. The telecommunications company plans to announce this week the start of a free, ad-supported mobile streaming service called Go90, a reference to the behavior of rotating a phone to watch videos in landscape mode. Aimed at 18- to 34-year-olds, the service will be available to all users, regardless of whether or not they are Verizon customers.

The cable TV giant is investing in online media outlets like BuzzFeed and Vox that attract young viewers. It’s setting up a streaming TV service for millennials who don’t watch a boob tube. And it’s developing a YouTube-like video app and website.

Millennials’ media habits are very different than older generations, but despite their devotion to online video and video games, they still watch a fair amount of traditional television. This summer, they’ve been especially interested in zombies, teen moms and just about anything on Adult Swim.

Ratings among adults 18-34 have fallen 14% over the past year, with the deepest declines at Viacom, NBCU and Fox. Mystery: Will they ever come back?

TV stations and programmers that don’t embrace social media are missing a good portion of their potential audience. And to maximize audience, programming must be available where viewers access digital content. Social media also ranks highly among millennials in deciding which TV shows to watch.

A new study finds that just 18% of their television time is spent viewing live broadcast or cable. The majority of their viewing is done on digital devices. SmithGeiger’s Seth Geiger talks about the results.

The results of a new survey on the use of original digital video challenge the assumptions commonly made by many, typically older, media executives about how young people choose, watch and share this video. Here are the seven things they need to know about this importance audience.

It’s the hot thing right now, and advertisers love that it reaches millennials. But buyers and sellers remain divided on metrics and fraud concerns. Plus, it’s so disorganized.

TV sports networks, and the advertisers that fund them, have spent the past decade chasing younger viewers. But if sports TV executives have their way, that push to get younger and younger is about to change — not so much that they will target senior citizens, but some of the most influential executives in sports media don’t think 20-year-olds should have the type of influence they currently wield.

A new study from Deloitte shows just how prominent online video has become in their lives and how they differ from Gen Xers and others.  Deloitte Vice chairman Jerry Belson talks about where TV viewing is going, how Trailing Millennials’ habits differ from older Millennials, and why TV ads still carry significant influence..

When it comes to where younger Americans get news about politics and government, social media look to be the local TV of the millennial generation. About 6-in-10 online millennials (61%) report getting political news on Facebook in a given week, a much larger percentage than turn to any other news source, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis. This stands in stark contrast to Internet-using baby boomers, for whom local TV tops the list of sources for political news at nearly the same reach (60%).

A new study finds that 80% of millennials will tune into a TV show if someone on their social networks shares a clip or trailer of the show. This is compared to 66% of average TV viewers.

A new study shows that watching content online instead of on TV is the new normal for young millennials and even younger Gen Zers. Just how much digital video are they watching? The average survey taker viewed 11.3 hours of free online video (on sites like YouTube) and 10.8 hours of subscription video (on sites like Netflix) for a staggering total of 22 hours a week.

The new American Press Institute study on millennials and media consumption points to a possibble phenomenon of the “accidental news junkie,” a consumer who spends so much time on social media that he or she “develops a soft-focus expertise on current affairs” without much actual consumption of media. Derek Thompson parses the implications — and validity — of this dynamic.

A new survey of Americans ages 18 to 34, sometimes called the millennial generation, found that two-thirds of respondents said they consume news online regularly, often on a social networking site. Of those, 40% do so several times a day, according to the poll, conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the American Press Institute.

Many millennials find themselves simply fed up with their cable companies, for myriad reasons. Millennials aren’t cutting the cord simply because of medium preference, but also due to increasing prices. But it’s not that millennials are completely done with live television -– no, they’d just rather find a more accessible, cheaper option. Forty percent want access to live TV online, desiring real-time experiences rather than on-demand.

Millennials are expected to spend $62 billion on media content in 2015 — $750 per person — according to a new Deloitte report, nearly half of which will go to paid TV services. This complicates the more conventional picture of millennials as media spendthrifts, when the reality is their spending patterns are difficult to lock down. They’ll pay for things, one source notes, but most of those things aren’t being made by media cos now.

A breakdown of younger TV-media consumer behavior shows some differences when it comes to streaming and time-shifted programming.

The new wave of news startups is aiming at a younger audience. But do legacy media companies have a chance at earning their attention?

TV stations are more likely to woo young adults by fostering online conversation about news stories rather than by posting hard news headlines. Another tactic is to hire people in their 20s to whom social media is second nature.

There’s been plenty of talk about diginets this week on TVNewsCheck. The popularity of multicast channels offering so-called classic TV shows got me thinking that viewers of a certain age — millennials — need a channel they could feel nostalgic about. I’ve come up with a list of programming options that I think would sell very well and be extremely popular among the younger generation.

Despite the perception that the under-30 crowd is leaving newspapers and their websites behind for other digital news outlets, studies are finding that the newspaper is still a vital source of information for the millennials. Some 57% of those ages 18-34 read newspapers, in print or online, during the course of an average week. “There is no question that members of the younger generation tend to be more active in using digital media to seek and absorb information they consider relevant to their lives,” says Newspaper Association of America’s Jim Conaghan. “Newspapers continue to refine existing methods and invent new ones to reach younger generations through their digital platforms.”

The rapid adoption of tablets spells trouble for cable and other pay providers. Additionally, new social trends such as binge watching rely heavily on features like video-on-demand that many pay TV services lack or charge extra for. Increasing prevalence of smartphones and tablets, combined with new, faster wireless networks like LTE and new data-heavy plans, provide viable alternatives to traditional couch surfing.

Millennials look to TV to keep up with the hottest things to buy. Nothing even comes close to generating awareness among Millennials the way TV commercials do.

More Internet users are leading to more streamed TV or alternative TV viewing — with young viewers leading the way. The good news for network executives: They also are watching a lot of traditional TV.

Young media consumers — Millennials — continue to consume much more television related to online, and less traditional television than other viewing groups.