Are attention spans decreasing? Is the endless scroll of social media driving the need for shorter content? The real evidence points to a much more nuanced answer, one that Ronald Yaros, an Emmy-winning science journalist, professor, and digital engagement researcher, spends his time not only trying to understand, but find solutions to.
Yaros started his career as a TV science reporter and meteorologist. He found it challenging to communicate science topics, especially complex issues, so he went back to school to earn his master’s in education and then his PhD, where he turned his attention to how people process information.
Today, in addition to teaching, he is the Director of the Digital Engagement Lab, where his research examines the effects of content on people and the different variables that affect engagement.
Much of the lab’s work focuses on news content, but the research and tools they are testing can apply to business content of all types.
Is there really an attention crisis?
For years, the conversation was that people had the attention span of a goldfish, which was not much. You have to capture their attention in the first few seconds, or they move on to something else. While there is some truth to this (at least, the capturing attention fast part), people are not goldfish, and they can hold their attention for long periods of time, but there’s a big caveat to consider.
Yaros says that yes, there is a crisis, particularly with young people who aren’t engaging with news. But he believes this is a symptom of a more systemic problem: how we present and structure information.
People will spend hours on social media, or streaming services like Netflix and Apple TV. Why? Because the information is engaging. So how do you translate this experience to news or business content? Yaros isn’t expecting to transform news stories with TikToks or Instagram Reels; he’s simply arguing that the full page of text, inverted pyramid (where the most important content is at the top), linear structure that news organizations have always followed isn’t working anymore.
Yaros is focused on the first three seconds a person is exposed to content. Three seconds is a rule that people talk about for capturing a person’s attention, whether it’s text-based or video, before they move on to the next thing. But he’s also interested in what happens after those three seconds. What happens when someone does click on a headline or a link to learn more? How do you get them to keep reading?
What’s your digital DIET?
Everyone has a digital diet for their content. Typically, a diet includes demographics (D) and interests (I), which define the target audience. But you also need to go beyond those basics to understand how people engage with content by looking at things like their environment (E) and the time they have to engage (T). For example, a person might be interested in a piece of content, but they don’t have time to read it.
The question is: how do you structure content so it can be consumed as either short-form or long-form, and capture the attention of more people with a range of digital diets?
The research Yaros and his students are doing <a href="https://bitcomme.com/crm-looks-38-4-undervalued-on-gf-value/” title=”CRM Looks 38.4% Undervalued on GF Value™”>looks primarily at news content, but it’s easy to see how it also applies to content organizations share in marketing, sales, and customer service and support. We also see changes in how organizations present content that support the DIET idea. For example, blogs now include a summary, bullet points, and a time-to-read number.
Yaros argues that a full page of bullets equals a page of text. He’s also not a fan of the time-to-read number because it discourages people before they even get started. We can also point out that this is an average time; people read at different speeds, so the number is mis-leading.
So how do you structure content to get the most attention and support both short-form and long-form readers? And support them as they move through different phases of attention?
Supporting the needs of all readers at all times
Through the Digital Engagement Lab, Yaros and his team are leveraging adaptive AI to build a new way to consume content that supports scanners, skimmers, and full-text readers. The idea is not to get rid of long-form reading, because some people still want it. Instead, they are restructuring content to support multiple reading styles. This structure is the “Smart Story Suite,” and it looks like the following:
This is an application built by students. It takes a URL to a long-form piece of content, and it restructures it into a new format. No new content is added; it simply ingests the content and serves it in a new structure that includes a headline, short bullet-point highlights, a summary, and a series of sections that visually progress the disclosure of the information. You can select a section and read the content, then jump to another one, or select to read all. The last section is a fact-checking section that lists all the claims in the piece and whether each claim can be verified.
The new structure supports all types of readers and, in some ways, personalizes the experience by letting readers choose what they want to read and how they want to read it.
To see if the new format works, they tested it with three different groups of 1,700 people, ranging from 18 to 81. In every case, they found statistically significant increases in personalization, interactivity, and interest. In one experiment using the same content, people rated the new structure as more credible and trustworthy, possibly because they had more control over the information.
Yaros says that this Fall, they will automatically include short videos and plan to look at the impact of different advertising approaches in this new structure.
How does this translate to marketing and other organizational content?
The structure is good and makes perfect sense. If you look at some of the marketing and support content organizations produce, you see similarities because content marketers and technical writers have been taught to break content up into readable sections with clear subheadings.
Long-form content, also known as pillar or skyscraper content, that isn’t in PDF form often uses this format, with sections along the side that people can jump around to. For standard blog content today, you see highlights and summary sections at the top (although these have been added for AI, not people). And a lot of new research brands publish is offered in a more digestible format (see HubSpot’s State of Ecosystems report) and has similar characteristics.
This structure can show marketers and other teams how their content is read. Are people reading one section more than others? Are they skipping certain sections altogether? Marketers can use this information to improve future content, spending more time on what people want to learn or know. Fact-checking is also very useful for content that includes a lot of research.
It’s also a good structure for AI to ingest for organizations that are struggling to get mentioned in AI searches.
Yaros explains that news organizations that use social media and the Smart Story Suite model together can capture more attention from students and others who spend so much time on social networks. The same is true for business organizations. Capture interest in a topicthe click to learn more go to a web page like the one above that enables deeper engagement in the way the reader requires at that time
Another point is that this is a good use of AI in content development. Adaptive AI in this case is not writing new content like basic generative AI does. It’s simply taking the existing content and restructuring it according to a set of rules. This approach could speed up content production by letting writers focus on the content itself, not how it’s formatted, which can take a fair chunk of content development time.
For Marketing teams that want to share a lot of long-form content, including in-depth research, this digital view is perfect for people who want to read the information but don’t have time to sit down with a 30-page PDF.
My take
Yaros says small design choices can keep people engaged, and that a full page of text is basically a one-size-fits-all approach. Structure, on the other hand, equals choice, interactivity, and personalization.
This applies not only to journalism, but to all types of business content, from marketing to sales, to service and support. Some teams are already applying some form of this structure, while other teams could benefit greatly from implementing and testing it (I’m looking at service and support in particular).
The format of digital business content is miles ahead of most digital news content, so businesses are already on the right path to creating and publishing content that’s easy for prospective customers and customers to consume. But Yaros’s work can help businesses understand why it works on a deeper level, which is something most business teams don’t have time to do.
