Everyone Is Consuming So Much in 2026. How do we cut through the noise?

The average person now spends somewhere around 6 hours and 38 minutes a day on screens, scrolling past an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 ads daily. And somehow, despite spending more time in front of screens than any generation in history, people are absorbing less of what they see.

That's the paradox brands are actually up against, it was never really a content problem. It's an attention problem, and attention has become the scarcest resource in marketing - scarcer than budget, scarcer than reach, scarcer than solid creative talent.

Why nothing seems to land anymore

Screen-based attention has reportedly dropped to around 47 seconds on average, down from roughly 2.5 minutes just two decades ago. On social media specifically, 71% of viewers decide whether to keep watching within the first three seconds of a video, and even people who are genuinely interested in a piece of content will skip it if it runs past 60 seconds more than half the time. Gen Z, unsurprisingly, has it worst - averaging somewhere between 4.2 and 6.5 seconds of attention per post on fast-scroll platforms.

None of this is really about people getting "dumber", “ADHD-like” or less capable of focus, whatever the doom-scrolling headlines imply. Interestingly, attention span actually improves somewhat as people age past their mid-twenties - not because their brains change, but because they've gotten better at filtering out what isn't worth their time in the first place. Everyone eventually builds a better spam filter. Brands are increasingly the thing getting filtered out of our headspace.

We’re doing too much (of the wrong thing)

The instinct in marketing has always been: if something isn't landing, make more of it. That instinct is now actively working against us. Roughly 35% of social media users report weekly "information fatigue" - a specific kind of mental exhaustion that comes from being handed more content than anyone could reasonably process, none of which was asked for.

AI has made this dramatically worse by making content drastically cheaper to produce. Nearly half of consumers, and 57% of Gen Z and millennials specifically, say overall content quality has declined - not because any one piece is necessarily bad, but because volume has scaled up without value scaling with it.

People end up watching content that suspiciously feels AI-generated for less time and engage with it less, even before they've confirmed it actually was. Audiences have gotten fast enough at pattern-matching low-effort content that they don't need to be told - they can just tell.

What actually works

Pay real attention.  Ironically, in a landscape drowning in volume, targeted, tighter and shorter tends to outperform comprehensive and thorough. This isn't an argument for saying nothing of substance - more so for knowing exactly what people listen to and delivering it succinctly in relevant formats.

Treat disclosure and authenticity as non-negotiable.

Consumers who suspect they're being shown something manufactured disengage measurably faster - it's a real, quantifiable drop in attention. Content that is interpreted as genuinely made by a real person, even when AI assisted behind the scenes, keeps people watching longer than content that reads as generated.

Build for the filter people already have, instead of trying to drown  it. Discerning audiences have gotten good at disregarding content that isn't relevant to them specifically. The brands winning attention aren't the ones screaming into a filter that's already programmed to ignore generic messaging - they're the ones narrow and specific enough to slip past the filter entirely and reach their audiences effectively.

Fewer, sharper pieces beat a packed calendar. The instinct to fill every slot on the content calendar is exactly the instinct that's contributing to the fatigue audiences are reporting. A single well-made, well-timed piece of content will outperform a week of filler, and it costs less in production and in the audience's patience.

The bottom line

Nobody is going to solve the attention problem by producing copious amounts of content. Doing too much is the thing actively working against brands right now – more competition for the same withering window, more content training audiences to filter faster, more noise making the genuinely good stuff harder to find. The brands that cut through are the ones intentional about making their content worth devoting attention to.