Attention spans aren’t shrinking. Content is just getting worse.

I parked up at the Revel office this morning still chewing over something I saw on LinkedIn the day before.

It was one of those “top tips” videos: an industry expert sharing their best advice for getting the most out of video on the platform. Useful enough, until the last question.

Someone asked what their tactic was now that attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. The answer: when everyone else is zigging, I zag, so make your content longer and more valuable.

That one stuck with me, and not in a good way. Because it is being presented as a clever, contrarian move when it has always just been true.

Here is the thing nobody seems to want to say out loud. Human attention spans have not shrunk.

We have not evolved in the ten years or so that social media has really taken hold. Our brains do not rewire themselves that quickly.

The idea that we have gone from one kind of attention span to a dramatically shorter one in a decade simply does not hold up.

What has actually changed is the content. There is far more of it, and on the whole it has got worse. We are then told by the platforms that people can only concentrate for ten to fifteen seconds, so everyone cuts everything to fit.

That number has never been true. Not once.

I get asked the same question all the time. What is the ideal length for a video? There is only one honest answer. As long as it is interesting.

That is it.

Not ten to fifteen second cuts. Not a rule about leading with the message in the first three seconds. Not a format dictated by an aspect ratio.

As long as it is interesting, because at the end of the day you are only ever speaking to one person at a time.

So forget the arbitrary numbers. Forget the zig and the zag. If something is valuable and worth watching, people will watch it. If it is not, no amount of jump cuts or trends will save it.

That is the bit that frustrates me about seeing “make it longer and more valuable” dressed up as a tactic. It is not a tactic. It is the baseline. It is what good video has always been.

It is also the core of what we do here. We do not start with the length, the platform or the trend of the week.

We start with whether the thing is actually interesting and worth someone’s time. It does not need to be glitzy or glamorous. It does not need cuts flying around to keep your eyes busy.

It needs to be good, and it needs to be worth something to the person watching.

Make it interesting. Make it valuable. The rest tends to look after itself.