A poll claiming almost half of millennial and Gen Z audiences prefer social media content to TV shows and movies proves that ‘the consumer definition of quality is changing in media’, according to analyst Doug Shapiro.
The poll came from Deloitte’s 2025 Digital Media Trends report, which was published at the end of March. Deloitte asked 3,595 US consumers about their consumption habits, and just under half of millennial and Gen-Z respondents said that social media content is more relevant to them than TV and movies, and that they feel a stronger connection to creators than mainstream actors and presenters.
What this indicates, wrote Shapiro, who has spent nearly 30 years in media, is that while the old markers of quality — high production values and big stars — are still relevant, ‘they’re becoming less important’.
Shapiro did not form this conclusion on the basis of one poll, of course; he’s been noodling on it for a while. In January, he published an article in which he consolidated his thinking on the subject. It’s well worth reading in full, but the gist is that quality is not a value judgement, it’s merely the things that people consider when choosing between similarly priced goods.
Companies are typically terrible at preparing for and adapting to changes in people’s definition of quality, argues Shapiro, who makes his point via Airbnb, which changed the attributes people consider when choosing holiday accommodation. But the thing to remember is that the weight of all the attributes always ‘sum to 1’, and when new ones come along, they take up some of the space previously occupied by the old ones.
‘So…Whenever someone chooses one option over another for a similar use case and need state, it reveals that they implicitly considered that choice higher quality,’ says Shapiro. In media terms, that means, ‘When you slump down on the couch after a long day and scroll through Reels for 20 minutes rather than pick up the remote that’s an arm’s length away, you’re revealing that Reels is higher quality than anything on Netflix (or Disney+, Hulu, Max, Amazon Prime, etc), at least in that context.’
Shapiro’s definitely onto something here. The way people choose content is clearly changing, and the comparison with Airbnb is a cogent one. I’m just not sure his framework for media consumption fits neatly with people’s behaviour.
This LinkedIn discussion raises lots of interesting quibbles with Shapiro’s definition. My main gripe, though, is with the bit about choosing between similarly priced goods. Most media is free, argues Shapiro, in that it is either supported by advertising or part of a subscription that ‘carries no marginal cost to consume’. But that’s only true if you’re talking about the financial costs.
Choosing TV over scrolling Reels involves more effort than just reaching for a remote an arm’s length away; it also means selecting something to watch and then committing your time and attention to it, and that’s not a negligible difference in mental energy.
Shapiro does make allowances in his model for people’s specific need states when choosing between media, to explain why more people would watch a trashy chat show than a serious documentary. But need states are not quite the same thing as mental effort. When I’ve got a craving no more nuanced than to be entertained for a while, I often end up reverting to YouTube Shorts (I’m not a Reels man) because I can’t be bothered to look for something better on TV.
I think that considering the mental costs involved in choosing content would explain why music has not been disrupted by an influx of have-a-go creators in the same way as video — because it’s no more effort to listen to music from an established artist. It may also explain why so few creators have managed to bring their audiences with them when they try their hand at TV.
Of course, it’s a lot easier to nitpick an idea than construct one of your own. And, setting aside the semantics of ‘quality’, Shapiro is almost certainly right in his broader point: the media industry clings to legacy ideas about the quality and function of content at its peril.
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Main image by Gaspar Uhas on Unsplash