Commentary
Pay Attention Quickly!
- by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, August 21, 2017
According to the Statistic Brain Research Institute, working with Matt Levin, CEO & Co-founder of Donut, digital media publisher, and Brianna Catalano, it’s essential for brands to grab a viewer’s attention in three seconds or less in the social platforms era. Studies have shown, says the report, that young audiences are being defined by increasingly short attention spans, now even shorter than the “average goldfish.”
Donut, whose audience of young social media car enthusiasts has made them an authority on data-rich strategies for generating attention getting video content, says that Matt’s “3-second theory” is one that he’s described at events, and has resulted is Donut’s videos outpacing the average share views of BuzzFeed, Tasty, and NowThis.
Suggesting that it’s essential for brands to grab a viewer’s attention in three seconds or less in the social platforms era, according to research from Statistic Brain, the report cites some statistical findings describing attention span characteristics
With data from Facebook,Twitter, Google+Reddit, Pinterest, Google, Gmail, Attention Span Statistics shows data comparisons as follows:
- 8.25 seconds: The average attention span in 2015
- 12 seconds: The average attention span in 2000
- 9 seconds: The average attention span of a gold fish
- 25%: Percent of teens who forget major details of close friends and relatives
- 7%: Percent of people who forget their own birthdays from time to time
- 30: The average number of times per hour an office worker checks their email inbox
- 2.7 minutes: The Average length watched of a single internet video
And, Internet Browsing Statistics (Taken from 59,573 page views)
Percent of page views that last less than 4 seconds 17 %
Percent of page views that lasted more than 10 minutes 4 %
Percent of words read on web pages with 111 words or less 49 %
Percent of words read on an average (593 words) web page 28 %
(Users spend only 4.4 seconds more for each additional 100 words)
To access the original report, please visit here.
Jack Loechner is the Editor of The Center for Media Research's daily Research Brief. You can reach him at jack@mediapost.com.
Jack, it has long been known that it is vital to catch the viewer's attention in the first few seconds of any commercial and this applies to all age groups not just millennials. What comes next, namely comprehension and sales message registration, usually requires considerably more time than a few more seconds to become a reality, I'm afraid. The idea that large numbers of advertisers will convert their ad campaigns to six-second ads merely to accommodate the low attention spans of young adults is a very risky proposition for the moble folks to promote as it relegates this platform to "reminder" status, not the basic selling vehicle, for many advertisers.
The human condition is devolving.