Time spent watching short social videos is overtaking time spent watching television or movies, according to the latest data on Americans’ viewing habits.
In 2022, Americans spent 10.8 hours per week watching social or creator videos and 21.2 hours per week watching television or movies.
As of 2025, those numbers have shifted to 11 hours of social videos and 19.0 hours of television or movie viewing.
Shifting from television and cinema to short-form video is probably bad news for the quality of entertainment and the depth of thought required to consume longer-form content, but I was excited to see that overall screen time fell from 32 hours to 30 hours.
That’s still more than four hours a day spent staring at screens and consuming content, which is an insanely large and almost unbelievable number in my humble yet highly accurate opinion, but at least it’s trending lower.
Hopefully, those two hours per week are being shifted to activities like reading books, exercising, spending time with family and friends, crocheting, birdwatching, alphabetizing the spice rack, and enjoying sunsets.
My fear is that those hours have been shifted to things like online gambling, crypto-trading, stalking ex-lovers on social media, and planning gender reveal parties.
