People in their twenties watch 46 minutes of live TV on a weekday

Who is the content for? Most marketing plans answer that with a persona. Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications answers a simpler question every year: how many minutes people actually spend on each medium.

The FY2025 edition, published on 26 June 2026, surveyed 1,800 people aged 13 to 79 who kept a diary of their media use in 15 minute blocks from 1 to 7 December 2025.

The weekday, by age

Across all ages, people spent 183.9 minutes online and 156.1 minutes watching live TV on an average weekday. The internet is ahead, and the ministry notes that the gap is widening.

The average hides the real story. Split by age, the weekday looks like this, in minutes:

Video sharing means services such as YouTube and TikTok. Social media means posting and reading on SNS. Both are part of the internet total.

People in their twenties spend more time on video sharing alone than on live TV, more than twice as much. People in their fifties split their time almost evenly between TV and the internet. From the sixties on, television leads.

Video sharing was also the largest single internet activity across all ages: 54.5 minutes on a weekday, up 3.7 minutes on the previous year, and 73.1 minutes on a day off.

Which platforms

The survey also asks which services people use. Across all ages: LINE 92.9%, YouTube 81.5%, Instagram 54.8%, X 44.7%, TikTok 36.7%.

The age splits matter more for a brand. Instagram is highest among people in their twenties at 82.6%. X is also highest among twenties, at 73.4%. TikTok is highest among teenagers, at 67.9%.

Attention and trust are in different places

The same survey asked where people go for different kinds of information.

To learn about events quickly, the internet is the most used source overall, at 55.4%. To get reliable information about events, television is the most used overall, at 50.3%. Asked which media they trust, respondents put newspapers highest, at 58.8%.

So time has moved online, and a good part of trust has not moved with it. People give their minutes to online video and still turn to television and newspapers when they want to be sure.

For content marketing this suggests two jobs. Short video and UGC win the minutes, especially under 30. The claims inside that content, prices, numbers, results, have to hold up when someone checks them somewhere they trust. A video that gets attention and makes a claim the viewer cannot verify spends its reach on doubt.

Read the numbers with care

The ministry itself cautions that trends need confirming with future surveys, and that live TV viewing in particular moves with whatever programmes and events fell in the survey week. The figures above are averages across everyone in an age group, including people who did not use the medium that day.

Even with those limits, a company selling to people under 50 can see where the minutes are. In every age group the phone is the device people spend the most internet time on, and the younger the customer, the more of that time goes to watching someone else's video.