Tim Kitchen/Getty Images
- Generative AI is making it much easier to create online content.
- There’s so much more to consume and only so many hours in a day.
- The final large chunk of time left is sleep.
There are only so many hours in the day, yet tech companies, video streamers, creators, and influencers are producing more and more online content for us to consume.
Generative AI is chipping away at the final barriers to content creation as I write this. At some point, a wall of infinite content will crash into the limits of time. Sleep has become the last major chunk of our day that remains (mostly) free of digital media. So far.
“While it appears that everyone has been cutting down on sleep and dedicating more time to their screens, there is a limit to how much time people can spend consuming digital content,” the Bernstein internet analysts wrote in a recent note to investors.
In about 15 years, we’ve added about six hours a day to our digital consumption habit, according to EMARKETER, part of Business Insider.
Next year, Americans will spend more than eight hours with digital media of various kinds, according to EMARKETER estimates. This data excludes people younger than 18, so the total number could actually be higher.
The recommended amount of sleep is eight hours a night. So that’s a total of more than 16 hours, leaving 8 hours for other activities, such as eating, exercise, love-making, pooping, and talking to other humans IRL.
If this type of competitive pressure keeps building, sleep could be Big Tech’s next frontier.
As Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings said back in 2017, “We’re competing with sleep.”
It’s hard to know what form new nighttime digital media might take, although there’s already sleep-tracking technology and apps that claim to help you go to sleep better with meditation and special calming sounds.
Competing with sleep
An important caveat is that this data includes multitasking.
For instance, I could have been watching an online video of Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari’s new Formula 1 driver, while sending Slack messages to my EMARKETER colleagues about that digital consumption data. If I spent an hour doing both these things, that would count as two hours. (I would never watch videos like this at work. Just a theoretical example!)
Still, the number of spare hours to consume even more digital media is shrinking. As content volume soars, we’ll have to make more choices, which could mean some services are dropped more often.
For example, the Bernstein analysts wrote that increasing engagement on free social video apps could eventually cut into the audience numbers of paid video-streaming services.
“At some point, the pie stops growing, and the slice starts to shrink,” the Bernstein analysts wrote.