Why Will Long Form Win If Attention Spans Are Worse

“People can’t focus anymore because TikTok broke their brains.”

Rubbish.

YouTube reports 1 billion hours watched daily. People are binge-watching 8-hour podcasts.

Huberman, rightly or wrongly (it’s wrongly) - has more authority on health than the NHS for most of your audience.

Attention isn’t shrinking at all, it’s just being captured by different sources

And while content experts are telling you to compete with the algorithm, make everything shorter, do 20-second reels with the same tips that everyone else is sharing.

The question isn’t ‘how do I make my content shorter?’

It’s ‘who currently owns my audience’s attention - and why?’

You can’t out-dopamine the algorithm.

Netflix has 12,000 engineers optimising for one thing: keeping people watching.

Instagram has similar.

You have Canva and a content calendar.

This is not a fair fight.

What you can do is become the signal in the noise for a specific kind of person.

The 2% of creators getting 90%+ of watch time didn’t get there through hacks.

They got there through accumulated trust.

The way forward?

Spend longer with your audience

This does two things.

One, it acts as a filter because anyone unwilling to give you 20 minutes probably isn’t going to become a client anyway.

Two - it positions you as an expert.

You’ll notice that the Abbew’s and Tonic Health’s of this world don’t do long-form content? Because they have no understanding.

Being able to talk about a variety of topics for 20mins+ highlights you have something to say