Imagine trying to size the total number of hours people are mentally under-engaged each year. Let’s talk about it as the total boredom market—the fastest growing and most competitive part of the media world.
It’s the market that apps like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter have seized control of. But that’s only part of the story. There is an enormous war shaping up over the content you engage with when you are bored.
And people are bored all the time. Many people spend hours a day at boring jobs that only require a fraction of their mental attention. People are bored commuting or waiting on line or waiting for their venti-double-shot-frapa-whatever.
This market is different from the traditional entertainment market because it is much less about active and intentional consumption such as watching a play, going to a movie or having a dinner party with friends. And while there is some intersection between the traditional entertainment market and the boredom market, it largely represents new time.
Market Overhaul
In the last 50 years technology and demographics have completely overhauled the shape and size of the market. Around 1950, a big chunk of the total boredom market was driven by women at home alone doing household chores over long stretches of consistent time.
Another meaningful slice were people commuting daily and predictably from home to work and back again. Little Timmy certainly had moments of boredom in geography class, and a large agrarian population had stretches of boredom watching crops grow.
In this certainly over-simplified version of history, boredom happened over consistent, predictable, relatively long stretches of mostly solitary time. Media evolved to fill the boredom gaps. For women at home and farmers mostly alone, the medium was radio and then TV programs left on in the background on a consistent schedule produced serially to fill the time. For commuters who could only have access to print on a train or radio in a car, newspapers and radio shows evolved that they could consume daily on their commute or mostly scheduled consistent work-breaks.
The content of the time also mostly followed from the shape and size of the boredom market. It included long running, consistently scheduled dramas and soap operas. There were also columnists and articles about celebrity figures and narratives that could hold individual people’s attention over stretches of relatively consistent time.
Fast forward to today. There is a population of people who have relatively consistent and long stretches of time to fill—but it isn’t mothers at home during school hours. It is the growing elderly population.
Everyone else’s boredom has been atomized and variablized, in that technology has deeply changed the consistency of schedules. The easier it is for schedules to be modified and people updated, the more inconsistent daily routines become. Boredom is now generally fleeting moments between different work tasks in the middle of the day or interactions with friends and family. There aren’t long stretches of time with structurally little to do or where you have to be present but under-engaged.
The other way in which technology is affecting the boredom market is that tech makes work a lot more mentally challenging per hour.
Impact of Technology
Consider Excel’s impact on analysts. The leverage technology gives you, doing all the basic calculations for you, not only allows you to do more, but dramatically elevates the level at which you need to think moment-to-moment to be productive.
My theory is that this harder, more focused work requires humans to take more micro-breaks of doing nothing/boredom throughout the day—which dampens technology’s expected impact on productivity, and opens up far more moments to the boredom market.
So, who is winning and losing in the large and growing boredom market today?
The losers are easy to identify. Anyone who was banking on consistent and predictable boredom slots is out of luck. Newspapers, radio personalities and daily game shows and talk shows. They’ve been thoroughly outclassed by a new generation of companies that serve the new atomized and variablized boredom market: pipes like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. Still up in the air is what content you’ll engage with while using these apps.
A few years ago, it looked like the answer was going to be that each person’s friends would claim the bored time back from media companies—it was called social media for a reason. After all, who would you want in your living room other than your friends when you were bored?
It turns out, however, that after the novelty wears off and competition ramps up, your friends are in general pretty boring compared to the pros. Baby photos can be entertaining, and perhaps if both your micro-breaks happen to line-up, a chat would be nice; however, professional entertainers that are always consistently producing new content and investing in the production value are just better at addressing my micro-boredom and keeping me engaged than my friends are.
So, in many ways it is the Buzzfeeds and Business Insiders, along with the Kardashians and Gagas of the world that are winning the modern boredom market as my professional friends who are always available in my pocket.
Over the years there has been plenty of analysis of the pitfalls of media companies caught between the information market and the entertainment market. There is no question that many companies—especially print publishers like the New York Times— are befuddled by the fact that they are trying to straddle both information and entertainment with a common brand and distribution platform in an increasingly competitive world when the economics and strategies of each business are dramatically different—and conflicted.
What has mostly been missed in my mind to date is that the relationship between the entertainment market and boredom market is similarly confusing. The expanding boredom market is big and growing, and the form factors and approaches it takes to succeed are distinct from the traditional entertainment market.
That is why you see so many new brands cracking through as professional friends in the super-charged boredom market, and relatively little success of more traditional entertainment brands to make the leap. It also begs the question of where ultimate power will land between the powerful distribution channels for boredom content and the content creators on those channels.