This week, Shirley’s column looks at the digital world’s obsession with speed, and how time became the internet's most aggressively optimised metric...

Some things are meant to take time. Slow-cooked food. Long conversations. A good book. Bird watching. A day on the golf course?

The digital world, however, seems determined to turn everything into a five-minute activity.

Five-minute reads. Five steps to fix your marketing. Ten things you need to know. Three-bullet report summaries. Thirty-second videos. Six-second ads

Digital media has developed this strange obsession with speed. News apps now display reading times before you even click an article. Platforms reward content that gets to the point instantly. If something takes too long to explain, chances are it will get summarised, shortened or turned into a list.

Somehow, time became the internet's most aggressively optimised metric, and everything else is designed around it. The standard explanation: attention spans are shrinking. (At which point someone inevitably mentions a goldfish.)

One way to describe this "need for speed" is the mini-max principle: maximum stimulation with minimum effort. Or maximum drama, with minimum patience required. Btw, the mini-max principle also explains AI-generated content neatly: minimum production cost, maximum ad impressions.

Much of today’s digital media is built around exactly that idea. Short-form video delivers instant micro drama. Headlines tell you what to think before you've read the article. Articles come neatly pre-packaged with reading times. AI tools summarise entire reports into a few bullet points. 

Even productivity culture now revolves around doing more with less time, less effort, and ideally less thinking. And if the current wave of AI evangelists is to be believed, the ideal setup may soon involve five AI agents quietly running your life: one writing emails, one scheduling meetings, one summarising documents, one doing research, and one optimising your workflows. The real productivity hack is not doing things faster but not doing them at all.

And yet there is one format that seems strangely immune to the internet’s mini-max logic: podcasts. While articles are reduced to five-minute reads and videos trimmed to seconds, podcasts routinely run for an hour or more. And audiences (shockingly) keep listening. Podcasts, the small village of indomitable Gauls still holding out against the invaders. But how much longer?

Not much, as many listeners already "solved" the time problem by simply speeding things up. Listening to podcasts at 1.5x or even 2x speed, turning a two-hour conversation into something closer to a brisk commute. Which leads to hearing carefully recorded ads transformed into something like, "Thisepisodeisbroughttoyouby…" Apparently even podcast ads aren’t safe from acceleration.

Still, even within this speedy approach, something strange is happening. On one hand, digital media keeps compressing information into ever smaller time slots. On the other, audiences happily spend long stretches with some formats. They joyfully binge four seasons, ten 30-minute episodes each, but don’t have the time (or patience) for a 3h movie. Watch two-hour YouTube documentaries but can’t read a long-ish essay. Listen to podcasts that run longer than many films but can’t pick up a book.

So maybe the problem was never the attention span? Or at least not just. Maybe we have (time) commitment issues? A three-hour movie feels like a huge commitment. Ten 30-minute episodes feel a lot more manageable, even if watched all in one evening. Sure, the total time investment may be far greater but the commitment feels smaller. And in the five-minute internet, it’s not the total time that seems to matter. It’s how that time is packaged into mini-max, low-friction chunks. 

Digital media, of course, has become extremely good at making the next thing feel effortless to consume, whether through shorter formats, episodic structure or playback speed controls. And AI may push this logic even further. This entire process of finding something to watch, read or listen to may soon follow the same mini-max logic: maximum relevance, minimum effort. (Or at least the illusion of it.)

And advertising? Much of the digital ecosystem was designed for a world where audiences had no choice. A world that is long gone. Audiences have been skimming headlines, skipping ads, scrolling past content and speeding up videos for years. And they keep finding new tricks… like accelerating podcasts.

The Psychology of Boredom

That's where another explanation, a psychological one, comes in. Boredom. Psychologists James Danckert and John Eastwood define boredom as "the aversive experience of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity". Boredom isn't just the absence of stimulation, it's blocked engagement. And as Lumen Research CEO Mike Follett recently pointed out, advertising is almost a textbook recipe for it. It doesn't merely fail to interest us. It actively interrupts something people want to do and replaces it with something they didn't choose, and unlike almost everything else on the internet, you can't skip it, speed it up, or scroll past it. You just wait.

Which may explain why audiences have become so efficient at escaping it. And those five AI agents quietly running your newly efficient life? If they're also discovering your media, filtering your content, and deciding what's worth your attention, then the five-minute internet has reached its logical conclusion. Not content consumed faster. Content consumed for you.

TL;DR: Five-minute reads. 2x podcast playback. Bingeable episodes. Not shorter attention spans, just smaller time commitments.

Shirley Marschall is ExchangeWire's weekly columnist - find her on LinkedIn where she's making sense of ad tech.