Media Passion: 2018 vs 2008

May 2019

It’s that time of year again when Bridge Ratings publishes its findings for our “Decennial Media Favoriteness Report”.

The release of Apple’s iPhone in 2007 sent tremors throughout the media and tech landscape changing the way we live, do business and entertain ourselves. For Apple it was the beginning of a revolution in how people consume media - video, audio and text.

Once we saw the earthquake that occurred during that year, we decided to begin a long-term project to determine the impact of the new technologies that were introduced with the iPhone and subsequently adopted by other tech companies.

Since the beginning of Bridge Ratings as a company, we have used a metric called “Favoriteness” to determine a consumer’s preference levels for various media. We began using this term in relation to AM/FM radio listenership as an additional metric to describe consumption. “Favoriteness” was initially determined by asking radio listeners “What radio station did you listen to most this week, the one you would call your favorite.” The responses to this question provided a valuable passion score for radio stations and, we learned over time, that this passion score could also be applied to other consumption of media.

That brings us to the “Decennial Media Favoriteness Report”.

Since 2008 we have been annually tracking media consumer behavior and attitudes toward the platforms used.

In addition to AM/FM radio listening, we began measuring favoriteness for satellite radio, social networks and music consumption. Over the years we’ve added other media platforms: Music streaming, podcasts and smart speaker use.

And while we tracked this data annually, our main interest was to eventually see long-term trends and we published our first of these in 2013 with the five year report. At the beginning of 2019 we began tabulating usage trends and behaviors from the past ten years culminating in 2018.

Over 6 billion data points were analyzed and the results are eye opening.