Can brevity capture an audience drowning in content?
Over time, our appetite for content has shrunk. TV shows air with 35-minute binge-inviting brevity. Pop songs barely nudge three minutes.
YouTube Shorts are 25 seconds.
Busy digital consumers, with ever-diminishing attention spans, expect faster pacing and quicker rhythm. In fact — they DEMAND it.
So why do long-form 4,000-word articles and blogs still clog the web with their outdated and obsolete format?
Simple, because too many content writers worship word count and mistake mapping for meaning. They can’t condense views into a concise form — and don’t understand their readers.
Today’s web audience skims SEO “snackable” content. No one has the time to read twenty minutes of drivel.
Neither do I.
My email chimed and announced a fresh post (from a content site) titled —”How To Write A Blog People Care About.” I clicked.
It was a gargantuan post of over 5,000 words. I almost threw up in my mouth as the author of that tedious article framed his leviathan dissertation.
Listen, I tried. That piece promised guidance, value, framework and tips. It delivered layer upon layer of maps, charts and a compass. Thankfully, just like the movie The Brutalist, it also provided an intermission for a bathroom break.
I surrendered and left — after skimming as many bold-titled paragraphs as my stomach allowed.
My opinion? If you can’t write persuasively, with authority and clarity in under a thousand words, you don’t know what you’re saying — and website guests don’t have the fucking time to find it out.
Writers take note. Your web content is NOT battling with other websites, it’s competing for an audience with a very… short… attention span.
These thoughts were a slim three hundred words and could easily be skimmed in thirty seconds.
You’ll spend more time running for a bus today.
You’re welcome. 😶
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The Takeaway:
I posted this prose to Reddit’s copywriting community as well as several other content sites. It was immediately labelled as being AI-written, and I was attacked by content writers defending bloated blogs. The backlash proved my point: brevity (and sharp narratives) threatens the industry and writers who aren’t up to the task.
I understand that algorithms measure time spent on a page, and this piece is short. But damn, I’ll bet people will read it more than once to get all the laughs. And laughs… add up to time.
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One last thing:
This piece (albeit satirical) sells surgical efficiency. The tension pits a modern attention span against the tedium of long-form content. For people drowning in data, I minimize the noise and deliver an authoritative message with brevity. I convert their saved time into immediate lead action. Or at the very least into a “Thank you” — and a return visit.
Listen, don’t get me wrong, I am a chameleon and will speak in your tongue with as many words as you want.
Just saying… 😂
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