Here’s a number worth sitting with. Creator video screen time now makes up 26% of all the time people spend with TV and video – roughly 1.7 hours a day, according to fresh 2026 data from Media Dynamics reported by EMARKETER. That’s not a rounding error next to traditional telly. Linear TV sits at 35%, streaming at 33%, and creator content has climbed into the same conversation. If your brand still treats creator video as a nice-to-have, the maths has moved on without you.
I film UGC for brands every week, so I watch this shift from the inside. A few years ago, creator content was the thing you sprinkled on top of a proper campaign. Now it’s a quarter of where attention actually lives. That changes what you should be making, who you should be making it with, and how much of your budget belongs here.
What the numbers actually say.
Three figures do the heavy lifting. Creator video is 26% of time spent with TV and video. It’s around 1.7 hours a day per viewer. And it now sits shoulder to shoulder with linear and streaming rather than trailing far behind. The younger the audience, the sharper it gets: 13 to 24-year-olds spent over 12 hours a week with social and creator video in 2025, and 25 to 34-year-olds nearly 13, per Hub Research cited in the same report.
Marketers have clocked it too. Nearly half – 48% – already call creator partnerships an essential investment, per IAB and Advertiser Perceptions. So this isn’t a fringe bet any more. It’s a line item most of your competitors are already funding.
Where all that time is going.
Some of the most interesting movement is onto the biggest screen in the house. Creator content used to be a phone thing – thumb, feed, quick scroll. Now a big chunk of long-form creator video gets watched on the living room TV, pushed there by platforms making it easy to open YouTube and creator channels straight on the telly. A clip someone discovers on their commute can land on the family TV that evening.
That matters for your brand because the same video now has to hold up in two very different settings. On a phone it competes with a fast, sound-off scroll. On a TV it sits in a lean-back moment where people expect something that looks and feels finished. Content that only works in one of those places is leaving the other half of the audience on the table.
Why this reshapes how you brief video.
The instinct, when you hear “creator video is a quarter of screen time”, is to make more of it. Fair enough. But volume isn’t the point – fit is. As more brands pour into the space, the ones that stand out pick creators whose audience and style genuinely match theirs, come up with ideas that feel original rather than lifted from last week’s trend, and build ongoing relationships instead of one-and-done posts.
Practically, that means briefing for the goal and handing over creative freedom, not writing a word-for-word script. Scripted content looks scripted, and viewers smell it instantly. Give me a clear objective, the one thing you need people to remember, and the rest is my job. That’s the whole reason creator video works – it feels like a friend’s recommendation, not a 30-second ad. Lock it down too tightly and you lose the exact thing you’re paying for.
What good creator video looks like on a big screen.
If your content is going to end up in a living room, a few things stop being optional. Shoot clean, so it holds up past a small phone frame. Keep the hook honest – the first two seconds still decide whether anyone stays, whatever the screen. Caption everything, because plenty of people watch sound-off even on the sofa. And think about the product moment landing clearly, so someone can act on it whether they’re holding their phone or reaching for the remote.
The good news is one shoot can do a lot of this at once. Film properly, then cut for the feed and for the bigger screen from the same day’s footage. You get reach across both without paying twice, and the content that earns its place on a TV tends to be the content that was well made in the first place.
Where to start.
You don’t need to reinvent your whole marketing plan around one stat. Start by moving a slice of your video budget from polished studio spots to creator content that feels real, test a handful of angles rather than betting everything on one perfect video, and pick a creator you’d happily work with for six months, not six minutes. Attention has already moved. Your budget can follow it without a huge leap.
If you want content built for both the scroll and the big screen – filmed, edited and delivered ready to post – that’s exactly what I do. Take a look at the packages here or email me at [email protected] and tell me what you’re launching. I’ll help you make video worth a quarter of someone’s screen time.
