Research Indicates That Attention Spans Are Shortening

Tech-savvy users often say that the way the modern internet works has made it so that people’s attention spans are getting shorter every single day but the truth behind this story is rather tough to ascertain. However, recent data from SimilarWeb indicates that people definitely are suffering from shorter attention spans, and what’s more is that these attention spans are shortening at a pretty rapid pace when you take into account the numerous factors that are coming into play, all of which serve some kind of purpose in this trend.

If you look at the data for how long users spend on websites before navigating away, for the most part the trend has been that these times are remaining more or less stable on web based browsing, but if you look at the trend for mobile browsing between the years 2017 and 2019 you would see that there is a drop of about 11 seconds in the average time spent on a website. When you take into account the fact that mobile browsing is starting to become a lot more popular and in many ways has become the preferred form of browsing for people on the internet, the change is a lot more drastic.

The data suggests that the average amount of time spent on websites before navigating away for all devices has gone down by 49 seconds which is a pretty huge reduction all things considered. This is important data because of the fact that this will have a large impact on the kind of content that is being produced, and it will also incentivize websites to start adapting their designs and user interfaces to capitalize on what they now know. It’s important to note that desktop browsing is still going strong, it’s just mobile browsing times that are dropping which is causing a change in the statistics.

The Shortening Human Attention Span

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