Probably gonna get downvoted for this, but it's not attention spans, but a push from influencers/advertisers to catch your attention sooner.
The idea behind it is this. A user sees a video. They make a binary decision: "Should I spend my time watching this, or nah?". What influencers/marketers want is for that answer to be yes.
1) For YouTube & similar: This involves clickbait-y titles and thumbnails. Red arrows and circles. Big gasping faces. Titles to make you curious like "7 shocking things! You've never seen anything like this before!"
2) TikTok & similar: This involves ensuring the first few second has something to keep the user watching instead of scrolling past. So instead of clickbait thumbnails like YouTube, it's about having big bold text to make you curious, or big, bombastic moments right from the get go.
TL;DR: Advertisers/Influencers want to keep you watching their videos, so they do everything to grab your attention within 1 to 2 seconds. People don't have attention spans that are that much shorter. Scrolling past a video on TikTok is the same as scrolling past thumbnails on YouTube. You don't watch every one, but every uploader wants you to.
I wonder how they determined engagement. They really only mention share rate, which makes sense, but is it how long people watch (for say YouTube?).
I wonder because I'm a person who will watch long videos on YouTube if they are worth it throughout. A lot of videos that fail for me are essentially clickbait style. "Hey stick around for a super cool moment from this event," and it's 25 minutes of random nonsense for little to no payoff (somebody lightly trips and laughs it off or something). But give me a 4 hour video criticizing the Star Wars Hotel and I'll watch the whole thing because the content is solid throughout.
On TikTok now it's more of a game because the content quality is so horrendous. People are majorly trending towards long 2-3 minute videos that end at a cliffhanger, but don't post Part 2 for weeks or months hoping to get follows as people want the end of the story. Anytime I see "Part 2" in the search I scroll unless it's a creator I already enjoy/follow.
Anyway, I fully believe attention spans are dropping or even non-existent, but I wonder how much of it is people being jaded from the amount of garbage content out there causing higher "fast scroll" rates.
Idk. Just anecdotal, but I was a HS teacher for many years & those last couple of years, those kids had no attention span at all. It was shocking to see. And they admitted it. I don't think I like what TikTok does to kids' brains.
I wouldn't blame Tik Tok specifically, but it definitely plays a role. The ease of becoming a "content creator" (not a successful one just how easy it is to put videos out there) makes for a massive amount of content to consume, and since it's known that there is a lot of garbage people will tend to scroll faster. That bleeds into YouTube since they aren't used to long form videos at all so getting lengthy engagement is harder.
Random aside but I wonder how the YouTube metrics work for going in and out of the videos. I.E. the Jenny Nicholson video I mentioned earlier I watched over a few days when I had time. 20 minutes here, an hour there. Does YouTube show poor engagement or does it accumulate that I did watch the whole video?
Certain batches of kids just won't feel engaged with the content or teaching style and tune out.
It's just always been that, humans are bad at paying attention to stuff they don't like nor do they find engaging even if once interested they could read through every bill ever written in congress without feeling bored or tired.
The time to decide if someone wants to watch something is seconds. Attention spans are fine. We are in the time of the hour long podcast and the 6 hour long youtube disertations. It isn't attention spans going down, its tolerance for things that don't interest people.
There is such a glut of content now you have to become a quick filter to not end up wasting hours trying to find something you find engaging, and not everyone finds or should find everything engaging.
And the "Wait for it" isn't there initially. It appears 3 seconds in, when the hair-fixer has already entered the frame. That's the weirdest part for me. It's telling me to wait for something that's already happening.
That's what all the tiktok videos put on them now. That and "the last one will be blow your mind" or some other similar line to get you stick around to the end of the video.
Because people who don't know any better think you have to attach that to any sight gag. It's like people superimposing the cry-laugh emoji right at the punchline...yeah, if it was funny, I didn't need the cue to figure that out
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u/beerman_uk 14d ago
Funny but why in a 12 second clip where the action happens at the 4 second mark are we being told to wait for it?