How much does it cost to get your attention? You might be surprised. With many apps rolling out their own versions of TikTok’s short video clips, it is hard to stay competitive. Our attention spans have been decreasing since the age of social media and the rise of social media apps finding new ways to capture our attention. The app that can hold our attention the longest wins. TikTok, one of the newest platforms to join the race, has been successful in growing the fastest and holding out attention the longest. The main separating feature is the fact that TikTok was the innovator in creating this type of idea and continued to refine the idea until the app was a data-churning machine.
Whether this is ethical or good for us is another issue. The cost of using these apps, an intensely debated topic, for our mental, social, and political health is becoming more widely contested. One thing for sure is that these apps will continue to find ways to shorten our attention span.