Photo by Collabstr on Unsplash

TikTok, following Vine, was among the first platforms to make short videos (15–60s) mainstream. And today, they are more popular than ever. Maybe this format is the new norm, even.

Jumping on the bandwagon, all the big social medias have adopted the “new norm”, with Facebook and Instagram launching “Reels” and even YouTube, that arguably made online videos cool in the first place, saw the must of providing bite-sized content for (mainly) the younger generation, launching “Shorts”.

But this popularization of short videos, that we flick through tens of in a matter of minutes, has been all but great for our attention spans. And seeing a certain trend in these videos made me realize that.

How creators grab their audience’s attention

Facebook, might be considered an ancient artifact already — like the people using it — by the younger generations. But it continues to follow the trends (and tries to create the next big thing). Since younger generations are having TikTok as their main, and maybe only social media, Facebook must be scared to death about their remaining users migrating. So following the trend of bite-sized videos, they launched “Reels”. And recently I have found myself addicted to them.

Even though I don’t actively use TikTok, most of the Facebook Reels content is reposted from there and the concept is very similar, thus I feel confident using TikTok as the example here.

The forementioned trend is an occurring pattern in these videos. It is the titles (either in-video or in the caption) on many of the videos and what this could tell about the users’ attention span.

“Watch till the end” seems to be one of the most popular attention-grabbers, others being the likes of “wtf🤯”, “How in the world!?!” and simply “😂😂😂”. So what do these creator-made incentives tell us about the users’ behavior? To me, this seems like a trick to get the audience to stop for a moment and actually watch the video, instead of immediately flicking through, if it doesn’t offer excitement or spark curiosity starting during the first few seconds. If you see a bunch of laughing emojis, you might wonder what’s so funny about this video and keep watching until the end. Likewise, the creator is telling you to “Watch till the end”, you might be convinced that the climax will come and it’s worth seeing.

Below are some examples.

Attention-grabbing titles | Facebook reels by various creators

These screenshots tell not only about our shortening attention span, but also about our selectiveness. “Don’t judge a book by its cover” they say, but yet that’s exactly what we do when shopping for one. As we can’t check out every one of those hundreds of books in the store, only those that grab our attention with their cover usually end up in closer inspection. Nor can we watch through all of the clips in our endless feed — even though curated by AI — before deciding which one to spend some of our precious lifetime on. No matter how short they are, we want the cream, not the milk.

Creators have some marketer in them

These independent creators are fighting for the users’ attention just like marketers making ads are: on YouTube, for example, marketers have only five seconds (of fame) to impress the potential customer not to skip the ad or to stop watching it (as with old-school TV or unskippable online ads), so they often add more oomph, or another incentive to keep watching, to the first seconds to capture the viewer’s attention and then it’s a whole other story about keeping them watching. TikTok is not that different — actually it’s even worse.

On YouTube, there are only two sides involved in this fight: the video itself and the ad, with the ad not fighting against the video (unless the user clicks through). On TikTok however, the creators are actively fighting against each other: if you flick away creator A’s video, creator B’s video will show up and perhaps get the user to “Follow” creator B and consume their content more. So creators are trying to make sure that no one skips their video based on the first few seconds.

If the video is scripted, like a marketer would write an ad, the creator could just add a hook at the start of the video pre-production to grab the fish and pull it until the end. But for the types of content, where this is not possible (e.g. captured live-action), something needs to be done post-production. An easy (and probably effective) way is to add some intriguing text on the screen with the app.

Good old days

We have come a long way since we would watch through a TV show, because it’s all that was on. Back then, the first seconds or even minutes didn’t matter, since if the viewer wanted to relax watching telly, it would take a truly bad show to make them turn it off and just sit there in silence, listening to the clock ticking and chickens clucking. I talked to my dad and he said that in his childhood they only had two channels on TV. It was either something from those or nothing at all. There was no broadcasting during nighttime, but everything would stop before late. He told me that he and his friends didn’t have much time to watch TV because they were busy playing outside.

Today, the opposite is true: children don’t have time to play, because they’re busy (read: addicted) with their smartphones, tablets and online games. The world moves at lightspeed nowadays and we have an endless amount of content on our fingertips, on-demand 24/7. Whatever you would like to watch or listen is available to you wherever, whenever. You can only imagine the impact on our mental health this endless availability can have on us — or you can just run a simple online search and read about it, as all the research (even if still scarce) is out there.

Now, I’m not one of those “boomers” telling you how the “good old days” in the stone age were much better and the only media should be cave paintings. But I’m boomer enough to admit, that despite these short videos being a handy format to pack a lot of information/entertainment into a 1-minute clip, overconsuming them is all but good for us. And research agrees with my suspicions. So once again, let us be mindful of our media usage and screentime, for our brain’s sake.