We're not goldfish. You're just boring.
The attention economy
I have just spent the last god knows how long doomscrolling on TikTok with no idea what I actually consumed. Ironically, it took me a video posted on the platform, reminding me to stop doomscrolling, to pull myself together and put my phone down.
I normally am pretty good at avoiding the enticing lure of the limitless scroll, but I'm off the back of a very busy weekend involving both a wedding, a housewarming BBQ, and a flight. You could say my brain is fried, and that's the reason I'm not paying proper attention to any of the said TikTok videos. Or you could say my attention span is just ruined.
Only one is correct.
There's a lot of chat about the attention economy at the moment, and it's easy to get overwhelmed by scaremongering statements that make us believe humans are on track to have the same attention span as a goldfish (8 seconds). So I've decided to spend the next hour or two instead dedicating my scrolling to getting to the bottom of our attention habits, and what businesses can actually do about it.
The phrase attention economy gets thrown around a lot, and until 5 minutes ago, I myself believed it was a new-ish term coined on social media. But the idea behind it was described back in 1971, when Herbert Simon described how a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
In other words, when information becomes abundant, the scarce resource isn't the information, but the attention required to consume it.
If only Simon from the Seventies knew just how much information would be out there in the future, because fifty-five years on, the supply side has gone vertical.
More than half of all written content on the internet is now AI-generated (sigh), and 74% of newly created web pages contain synthetic text (double sigh). Yet the demand side hasn't moved at all. We all still only have 24-hours in a day. Infinite supply, but a very fixed demand.
Attention is the #1 problem for anyone building a business around their own ideas. And being boring has become very expensive.
My initial Google search (no, not the AI-generated bit!), led me to some recent (June 2026) research on this very topic. Assume that all stats and quotes are from this, unless otherwise stated.
I recommend reading the whole thing too, but I know your attention span is limited, so here is the condensed version.
So what is the human attention span?
The headline is that no, we are not (yet) goldfish. We remain biologically capable of sustained focus, but the tech-heavy environments we have created for ourselves are overloading our brains. So to prevent mental fatigue, our brains engage in increased task-switching.
We've switched from sustained attention (deep processing and focus on a single stimulus) to kinetic attention (rapid filtering and assessment for continuous task-switching between multiple stimuli).
In short, our environment stops us from concentrating on just one thing.
Longitudinal studies of screen-time behaviour support this. Average focus on a single screen, before a user switched contexts, was:
In the latest study, it was a median of 40 seconds, meaning half of all observed screen-focus intervals are 40 seconds or less.
There's a whole host of issues surrounding this.
Primarily, the attention residue that Sophie Leroy originally spoke about in 2009. Gloria Marks later supported the claim with findings that interruptions to a bigger task can prevent us from getting back to a state of deep work for an average of 23 minutes.
The fact that multitasking in digital environments can increase stress by up to 40%.
It is also linked to making us more forgetful, less productive, and just generally wasting a lot of time in front of multiple screens with no given purpose (see: the 45+ minutes I've just spent on TikTok).
And what can brands do about this?
This is not the place for me to harp on about how we all need to get off social media, because, sadly, social media is very good for business. But we can still learn a lot from this.
As a large caveat, there's a measurable difference between winning over attention and earning it. You could have notable formats, flawless branding, and a perfect posting routine, and still be entirely forgettable if your content is boring.
These tactics might help decide whether you get seen, but don't forget the goal is to be remembered.
With that...
Make sure you're using the right formats for your marketing
Short videos or quick carousels - anything you can digest in under 60 seconds - are for brand discovery.
TikTok claims that videos under 21 seconds get the highest completion rates (88%), so that's a good starting point.
Now if you want to convert that audience, you need to get them to trust you. And trust comes from long-form content, where the (smaller) audiences surpasses that 47-second threshold.
Think 2,000-word deep-dive articles (that for the love of god you write yourself), podcasts, YouTube episodes, an in-depth, long carousel. Crucially this needs to be something you commit for, and whilst engagement may be lower, those who do engage will be retaining more information, building more trust, and ultimately be far more likely to convert.
Focus on being recognisable
If the median look is 40 seconds, the first job of any piece of marketing isn't to explain what you do, but to make sure someone can identify you before they've decided whether to keep watching.
Research from VCCP Media and Amplified found that when distinctive brand assets were present, 1.5 seconds of genuine attention was enough for an ad to be recalled, and well-branded ads returned 3.5 times the ROI of their unbranded counterparts. There are many many reasons to get good branding in place, but it ultimately comes down to you being recognisable.
So get the basics right.
Stick to your colours, your fonts, your formats, and key phrases or structures. Ideally keep showing your face if you're a founder-led business or service provider (yes yes I hate it too, but it helps). You may be bored of it, but no one else is paying anywhere near as much attention to your content as you, so you need to make sure at the very least they recognise it as yours.
(And no, unless your branding sucks, this does not mean you need a rebrand. If you're constantly changing up your branding, you're giving yourself a very steep climb to become recognisable).
Measure your attention stats
With privacy concerns growing, it's getting harder to track digital campaigns. Third-party cookies being phased out of websites means it's sometimes difficult to get a complete picture of campaign effectiveness, and with the decrease in likes we are handing out on social media, they're no longer a reliable metric either.
So what do you track?
Limit the cognitive overload
We face thousands of digital choices a day, and that's one of the top reasons we keep switching between tasks. You want any leads you have to stay on your content, or in your chosen journey. So pick just one key next step you want them to take.
Do you want them to book a call? See your services? Scroll new in?
There are, of course, exceptions to this, but by a general rule, I recommend one clear next step per section.
For anything social, each post in one section.
But for marketing tactics like newsletters and your website, where multiple sections are combined, give each section one clear, relevant next step.
Build a routine
If you manage to win over that 40-second window from a target customer, what happens next?
It's a slim slice of people that convert immediately, so you want them to keep coming back until they do. And that's the difference between attention you buy and attention you build. If you can get into a routine with your marketing, attention becomes cheaper to capture every time you run it, because the audience does the remembering for you.
Routines are built on predictability, not frequency. Despite the insane volume of AI-content that is being spat out onto the internet, you do not need to do more. You just need to do your own cadence well.
I always recommend starting with one short-form and one long-form attention-capturing strategy, and nail that before you move on to anything else. That could be a weekly Substack, newsletter, podcast, or YouTube episode for your long-form. Or whatever achievable cadence you can manage for short-form. I personally can only commit time to two Instagram posts a week, and so that's what I do. My goal is to move to LinkedIn also, but I need to nail my Instagram routine first...
So are we goldfish?
No. We're something far more inconvenient than that: we're excellent editors.
Forty seconds isn't the length of time we are capable of concentrating for, but it is the median length of time we're willing to give something before deciding it isn't worth it.
Which means the attention economy isn't really a problem of attention spans, but a problem of what businesses keep putting in front of them.
You can buy your way into the 40-second (plenty do), but it will die the moment you stop paying for it. And the bigger goal isn't to win the bigger slice of somebody's Sunday night scroll. It's about becoming one of the few things they choose to come back to, and ensuring that next time, none of their precious seconds get spent working out who you are.
I still couldn't tell you a single thing I watched on TikTok earlier, but I can tell you the name of the different Substacks I religiously read, and when they're released. And that's not on my attention span; that's on the businesses.
Taking my own advice, what's your one next step?...
