‘Personalisation risks becoming isolation’: Brits increasingly consume commercial media alone
Brits aged 16-34 now spend nearly half of their commercial media time in isolation from others, according to data published by the Institute for Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) today.
The trade body’s latest Making Sense report found that the key demographic now spends 49% of their commercial media time watching social media or other online video services, activities that are largely done alone within the confines of a personalised content feed.
Among all British adults, the share of time spent consuming commercial media on their own now sits at 44%, up 10% since 2015, when the IPA first began tracking the figure.
In actual time spent, supporting data from the IPA’s TouchPoints database show British adults now spend more than two and a half hours each day consuming commercial media on their own, up from one hour 56 minutes in 2015.
Making Sense 8 also revealed a substantial decline in intergenerational overlap in media consumption. In 2015, there was a 44% overlap in media reach between age cohorts; today, this has fallen to just 22%.
Men in greater isolation than women
According to the report, men now spend more time, and a greater share of that time, consuming media alone than women.
Men now spend 46% of their commercial media time consuming alone, up 15% from 2015. In comparison, women spend 41% of their commercial media time consuming media on their own, up just 7% from 2015.
The difference is more stark when looking at total time spent. Men spend, on average, two hours and 47 minutes per day consuming media in isolation, up 48 minutes from 2015. Women spend a whole half hour less time consuming media alone each day (two hours and 18 minutes), an increase of 24 minutes from 2015.
Young men don’t see ads reflective of ‘the man they want to become’
The differences lend credence to widespread concerns that young men have become particularly susceptible to online isolation, often leading to algorithmic recommendations on social platforms that promote “manosphere” content aligned with misogynistic and far-right political content.
A pair of studies released by Channel 4 in 2025 found that Gen Z is more embracing of having a strongman leader, that nearly half (45%) of young men feel promoting women’s equality has now led to discrimination against men, and that only four in 10 believe “society treats masculinity positively”. This summer, London mayor Sadiq Khan warned that the growing influence of the manosphere risked creating a “lost generation of young men”.
Smartphones and platforms driving change
The IPA’s findings follow similar research published last week by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and reported by The Guardian, which found that one in 20 English people aged 16 to 21 now report having no close friends at all, up fivefold since 2014. The proportion of people in that cohort that said they had at least three close friends also fell from 85% to 72% over the same time period.
The IPPR referred to young people as “the loneliest generation”, warning they are growing up in a “bleak world” in which they are “becoming dramatically more isolated from one another”.
The think tank pointed to youth club closures, unaffordable housing, declining self-esteem and the popularity of TikTok as having contributed to a decline in socialisation and mental wellbeing.
The Making Sense 8 data show that all adults are spending less time each day speaking to others face-to-face. 16-34s spend 11% less time per day doing so than in 2015, compared to 4% less time among all Brits.
It is a marked shift, driven primarily by the growing dominance of smartphones as the media consumption device of choice for especially younger generations.
According to the report, smartphones account for the same share of commercial media time (34%) as TV sets among all adults in Great Britain. For 16-34s, however, they spend 49% of their commercial media time on the device. In comparison, the cohort spent just 21% of their commercial time on TV sets, down from 32% in 2015.
Simon Frazier, the IPA’s associate director and head of marketing and data innovation, described the stark change in media habits: “Consider a Saturday night in a family home in the 1980s and everyone would possibly be glued to Beadle’s About, sharing anecdotes and bonding over a shared experience. Compare that to today, when the family is likely on multiple screens in different rooms, each engaging with things relevant to their interests.
“There is greater connection than ever before to the digital realm, but the shared media experience is increasingly under pressure.”
Notably, the shift toward personalised, isolated media consumption has occurred amid the rise of media platforms that originally billed themselves as “social”. Following the propulsive pandemic-era success of TikTok — which prefers to position itself as an “entertainment platform” — platforms that were originally known for facilitating online connections with friends through photo sharing, microblogging and direct messaging morphed to embrace short-form video and algorithmic feeds.
In 2020, for example, Meta did not show users on Facebook or Instagram any content from accounts they did not follow. By this year, 70% of the content shown to users on Meta platforms is from accounts they do not follow.
The change has led to rapidly growing revenue for companies like Meta and YouTube, driven in part by increases in total time spent and access to larger budgets from advertisers.
But it has also drawn the ire of mental health advocates and policymakers, many of whom have accused social media companies of addictive design. In March, a California jury found Meta and Google liable for a woman’s harmful social media addiction. Last month, a separate settlement between Meta and US state attorneys general will require Meta to allow teen users to deactivate personalised feeds, among other platform design changes aimed at limiting teens’ time spent on Meta platforms. As part of the settlement, Meta is incentivised to lobby YouTube and TikTok to make similar design changes.
This week, the Australian government proposed new draft legislation that would require platforms to let users of all ages opt out of algorithmic content recommendation features.
Winning attention without social cohesion
Frazier noted the increased isolation of media consumption has been fuelled by “the blurring of device boundaries”, with audiences engaging with content “on their own terms and in moments that fit the modern pace of life”.
He continued: “What this means is that winning attention now requires more complex strategies and planning, more context-aware creative, and these being based on a deeper understanding of how different media environments work.”
Farhann Cachra, Global’s commercial strategy director, likewise warned that as media experiences have become more personalised, they have become less socially cohesive.
“Personalisation risks becoming isolation, and with it an atomised society and a propensity to feed an individualised culture,” he said. “At the same time, the human need for collective experience hasn’t shrunk; it’s just been squeezed into fewer moments. That scarcity is precisely what makes them so valuable.”
No better is that depicted than in live sport, which, alongside news broadcasting and the rare mass cultural entertainment hit, remains one of the few predictable moments capable of capturing a wide, cross-generational, contemporaneous audience.
As such, and in part thanks to new entrants into the streaming market with big pockets, sports rights valuations have exploded. According to Ampere Analysis, spending on UK sports rights grew at twice the rate of total TV revenues from 2015 to 2025. In the US, spending on sports rights grew at five times the rate of TV revenues during the same period.
As Lumen Research CEO Mike Follett writes in The Media Leader today, the upshot of isolated media consumption is that not only does attention to advertising “splinter across a million little shards”, but so does communication between co-audiences.
“How can I be sure of a signifier’s value if I am the only one to receive the signal?” he asks. “Shared meaning needs shared media.”