I pulled three datasets that had nothing to do with each other and kept finding the same person. Here's what that looks like when you put it together.
Look at the chart. Real income climbed about $10,000 from 2010 to 2019, slow but steady. Then it dropped three years in a row. The 2023 number looks like a recovery, but it mostly just gets you back to where 2019 left off. A decade of gains, basically flat.
"The chart makes the 2019-2022 drop look like a blip. It wasn't."
Consumer spending hit $19.4T in 2023, which sounds healthy. But housing and healthcare take 51 cents of every dollar before anyone decides what else to spend on. Entertainment is 5.5% of the budget. It's not the first cut people make, but it's an easy one.
Q2 2020 spiked to 15.7% and everyone called it a COVID thing. But after it came back down it didn't land at 11% again. It settled around 13 to 14% and kept going. By Q4 2024 it's at 16.4%. That's not a spike. That's a new floor.
"It didn't go back. That's the part worth paying attention to."
Nonstore retail (Amazon, DTC, subscriptions) is now the largest single retail category in the US at $1.43T. The same person who compares prices on their phone before buying anything is also deciding every few months whether their streaming subscriptions are still worth it. That's the environment content providers are actually competing in.
Explore E-Commerce DashboardTV-MA and R-rated titles make up 46% of the catalog, TV-14 adds another 25%. More than 70% of the content is aimed at adults. Specifically the working-age adults from sections 01 and 02. The ones with flat real incomes, optimized spending habits, and maybe $80 to $100/month left after fixed costs for things they actually want.
Dramas are 2,427 titles. Nothing else is close. Dramas are what people finish, what they talk about, what makes someone recommend a platform to a friend. The catalog distribution isn't random. It maps pretty directly onto what retains a subscriber who's already deciding whether to keep paying.
"83 countries contributing content. The catalog went global before the subscriber acquisition strategy did."
The US is 37% of catalog titles, but US income growth is stalling. India, UK, Japan, South Korea are all growing their contributions fast. Whether that's intentional or just where production is cheaper, it points somewhere interesting: the content is already there. The question is whether the product and pricing strategy has caught up.
Real income roughly flat for a decade. Shopping behavior that's fully moved online and optimized for value. A content catalog built almost entirely for working-age adults with disposable income and a taste for drama. Each dataset on its own is interesting. Together they sketch out the actual consumer that streaming platforms are competing for.
That person has maybe $80 to $100/month in real discretionary budget after housing, healthcare, and groceries. E-commerce data shows they've gotten good at knowing when something isn't worth what it costs. The content catalog data shows platforms know who they're building for. The income data shows the pressure that consumer is under.
I built these dashboards separately and kept noticing they were pointing at the same thing. That's the kind of connection I like finding in data.