For at least a decade, a belief has been doing the rounds in marketing. It is repeated in agencies, in workshops, in client presentations.
People don’t read any more.
Attention, apparently, has shrunk to eight seconds.
You have to capture your audience in the first three, or you lose them for good.
Well, it’s a lie.
Documented, measurable and disproved by the data. So convenient to repeat that nobody has had any interest in debunking it. But why? And what consequences does this myth have on how we consume content and how we create it?
Let’s find out together.
The goldfish myth
The reference cited almost universally is a 2015 Microsoft study, which claimed that the average human attention span had fallen to eight seconds, lower even than a goldfish’s. The statistic, of course, went round the world.
The problem is that the study did not stand up to methodological scrutiny. Researcher Gemma Briggs of the Open University in Milton Keynes analysed the scientific literature on attention and concluded that the idea of an “average span” of attention is simply unfounded. Attention is not a fixed variable: if anything, it is a response to context, to the relevance of the content and to the motivation of the viewer.
And yet, although the myth had already been debunked in the scientific literature, marketing kept citing it because it offers a convenient justification to those producing short, fast and cheap content.
The metronome of attention
In 2024 YouTube recorded an increase in watch time for videos longer than twenty minutes. According to figures published by the platform itself, more than 45% of users’ total viewing time takes place on TV screens. Not on smartphones: on the sofa, in lean-back mode.
Spotify reports that podcasts with episodes longer than forty minutes have higher completion rates than shorter episodes in the same category. The correlation is counter-intuitive only if you start from the assumption that attention is always declining. If you start from the assumption that attention adapts to the quality of the content, the correlation is exactly what you would expect.
Long-form video is selection
A seven-second video can reach a million views. The relevant question, however, is how many conversions it generates, or how much authority it builds.
A thirty-minute piece that analyses a complex problem with rigour and depth performs a function no Reel can claim. Namely, selecting the audience. Those who reach the end have already shown a level of interest that no algorithm can generate artificially. Those who produce long-form content thus end up building, without even realising it, a relationship with a qualified audience.
We call this concept “owning depth”.
Not every brand needs to produce long-form content. But every brand operating in markets where purchasing requires trust needs a format that allows this variable to mature.
The strategy of slowness
In a hyper-fast market, choosing not to rush signals that the structure holds even without the compulsive cycle of constant updates.
Brands that build long, in-depth content occupy territory the market has left vacant.
And this territory, once occupied, is hard to erode. Doing so would require investment and consistency: qualities that most competitors lack the structure to sustain over time.
Perhaps not everyone is willing to listen to us, it’s true.
But those who do deserve a format able to hold everything we have to say.
New Connections (FAQ)
Is it true that today we can’t pay attention for more than 8 seconds?
The scientific literature on attention does not support the idea of a generalised decline in attention capacity. It supports the idea that attention is highly selective. People do not have less attention. They have developed more effective filters for deciding what to give it to. Content that gets past the filter, because it answers a real need or a genuine curiosity, holds attention for far longer than any industry benchmark.
Does long-form content work for everyone, or only if I sell complex services?
It works for every brand operating in markets where the purchase decision requires trust, time for evaluation and a perception of specific expertise. B2B, professional services, products with high perceived value, regulated sectors. In these contexts, the long format is the only one capable of building the cognitive conditions that precede a qualified decision. The short format can generate awareness, but the long format generates authority.
Isn’t producing long-form content too expensive compared with a simple social media post?
The unit cost of production may be higher, but the cost per unit of value generated over time is lower. High-quality long-form content produces traffic, positioning and authority for years. A Reel has a life cycle of forty-eight hours. The economically correct comparison is not between the cost of the two formats. It is between the value each one generates over the entire life cycle of the asset.
BLISS®
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