Your Customer’s Attention Span is Longer Than You Think

“People have an 8-second attention span.”

You’ve heard some version of this a thousand times. Some say that even goldfish can pay attention for longer.

That must be why people listen to four-hour podcasts, binge 10-hour Netflix series, dive into 5,000-word Reddit threads, and buy vinyl records at a faster rate than at any point since the Reagan era.

Let me be blunt: there’s no compelling evidence that human attention spans have declined in a meaningful way. TikTok didn’t break our brains—but it did change how we filter and find content.

So what’s actually going on here? Why do people think they can’t pay attention when they can?

In this post, I break down where the myth came from, the misunderstandings that led to its rise, and what it all means for marketers.

In 2015, Time and The Telegraph latched onto a report by Microsoft Canada showing that average attention dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013. A goldfish, by way of comparison, has a comparatively robust attention span of 9 seconds.

With a stat that catchy, it’s no wonder journalists jumped on it. Even a hardcore skeptic can see why it caught fire.

Of course, look underneath that study, and the references don’t check out. In fact, you can check out this article on the Temple University website, who in turn, references a 2017 Wall Street Journal debunking this. Below, I’ve included a verbatim excerpt because it is just a perfect takedown.

The great irony of all this, though, is that the stat spread like wildfire anyway because it was catchy. The spreading of this falsehood itself was proof that people do pay attention to the right message.

So attention spans are longer than you think. Great!

But, of course, that doesn’t mean people will pay attention to everything. There’s more stuff to pay attention to than at any point in human history. A person could pause time right now, live a million lifetimes, and not read a fraction of the articles indexed in Google, watch a fraction of the videos on YouTube, or listen to a fraction of podcasts in syndication. They’d probably not even finish using their Audible credits!

So for the rest of us, who are decidedly not unstuck in time, we have to choose. And that means saying no to everything we don’t care about.

Per a study by Dr. Gloria Mark at U.C. Irvine, “average attention span while using a device with a screen has decreased from 2.5 minutes in 2004, to 75 seconds (1:15) in in 2012, then stabilizing at 47 seconds from 2017-2023.”

Put another way: we switch faster, but we can still concentrate. And recent data suggests there are limits to how much switching our brains can even handle.

Given the amount of demands on our collective attention, and how much we have to filter our focus, you might wonder: what does this mean for your customer, and how you ought to communicate with them?

According to the research I’ve done, as well as the experience I’ve lived, we can break this into four factors.

I think everybody can agree that it’s easier to focus on things that we find interesting, important, or otherwise rewarding. That means if you reach out to your customer with content that lines up with their real needs or sates their curiosity, you have much better odds of holding their attention. Or, put another way, marketing is matchmaking.

In some B2B contexts, you can get away with throwing out facts and jargon. Sometimes, you really can list out benefits and close the sale.

But if you really want to make a sale, you’ve got to tell stories. This is so true that it’s become a cliche. But unlike other cliches, research backs this up.

A Stanford study found that story-driven ads were remembered 22x better than pure facts. And neuroscience research shows that when we engage with stories—especially emotionally charged ones—our mirror neurons activate, helping us emotionally simulate the story’s characters, which helps us connect with and remember the story.

This isn’t to say that you need to be able to channel Dostoyevsky and write about your prospect’s inner life with an uncanny level of insight and resplendent prose. Rather, just take a note from Dan Harmon, the guy who wrote Community and Rick & Morty. His “story circle” is just eight words:

You. Need. Go. Search. Find. Take. Return. Change.

This is all you need to give people something to latch onto.

This smooths out the cognitive work that most folks won’t want to do.

People scroll fast not because they can’t focus, but because most content just isn’t for them. But they’ll stop if they find something funny, infuriating, or validating.

Research backs this: emotional ads perform nearly twice as well as rational ones. Attention isn’t vanishing. People are just rationing it like any limited resource.

So consider that tone and timing matter as much as message. If what you’re saying doesn’t feel personally relevant, you’re easy to ignore.

Humans can only process about four chunks of info at once. Combine that with rising decision fatigue and cultural phenomena like millennial burnout, and the takeaway is clear: people aren’t broken—they’re overwhelmed.

Attention span isn’t the issue. Noise is, and people try to make sure their attention span isn’t wasted on noise!

This is why clean design, clear copy, and one idea at a time wins. Give people fewer hoops to jump through and they’ll hang with you longer.

Their brains aren't broken. They’re just busy.

Respect it.

People are busy. They’re juggling work, home, kids, finances, health, the news, the group chat, the dog barking in the background, and the six tabs open on their phone. You don’t get to be the center of their universe.

But that doesn’t mean that you can’t be a bright spot in it.

If you want your marketing to be the thing they stop and notice, it’s got to matter. So be helpful. Be direct, but keep it useful or entertaining. Don’t waste their time and don’t assume they owe you their attention.

A long post, a long video, even a long sales call—all of these things can work brilliantly if the person on the other end wants to be there. When you meet people where they are and give them something worth sticking around for, length doesn’t matter.

But it’s the moment you stop being useful that you lose them.

Before you ship any marketing campaign, ask yourself: “if I were in their shoes, would I be glad to have found this?” The answer needs to be yes, and then you need to test to make sure they feel the same way before you scale up.

Your customer doesn’t have a short attention span.

But they are short on patience for boring, bloated, or irrelevant content.

If you can make your marketing messages clear and reach people when it’s relevant, you’ve already done a lot of the work. And if you can give them a real emotional core and a bit of narrative structure, that’s even better.