You may have heard the myth that our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. In fact, a recent headline-grabbing study by Microsoft showed that as of the year 2015, our attention spans reduced to that of a goldfish; eight seconds.

This might sound alarming, yet maybe unsurprising given the distractions of the digital age we live in, but it doesn't paint the whole picture.

The BBC quickly moved to squash this study as pretty meaningless. It did this in two ways. Firstly, by becoming a white knight to voiceless goldfish everywhere and defending the fact there's no real evidence that a goldfish has an eight second attention span.

Secondly, by showing an 'average attention span' statistic is pretty meaningless in the real world. There are surely many nuances when it comes to the type of content we like and dislike?

Indeed there is, and the boffins who love data and research over at Source Global Research conducted a study that provides a more practical insight into what content we like to consume.

Surprisingly - or not to those of us who realise people have personal preferences as to how they digest content - the study shows that content is consumed in a bunch of different ways. And pretty much all of that content takes more than the eight seconds of our claimed attention to devour.

Image Credit: Study by Source Global Research

So, if you're an online business or personality (and who doesn't at least have an online presence these days?), this study shows that capturing your reader's attention could be a case of offering them different ways to digest your content.

Transcribe Your Videos and Audio into Articles or Vice Versa

The top two preferred ways to consume content was overwhelmingly by short articles (less than ten minutes reading time) and short videos (five minutes or less).

Offering your reader both types of content will make you a clear winner in your field and The Odyssey, where you're reading this article, does it perfectly.

There are plenty of audio and video transcription services out there that can do this for you if your audio typing isn't up to scratch. A quick Google search reveals many services, for example, Alphabet Secretarial in the first result.

That's an easy way to double your content output if you're a lover of video and audio creation.

For the writers who are camera shy, it's not the end of the world. You have a ton of options for creating videos out of your articles. Simply create slides out of your articles in PowerPoint or Google Slides and talk your reader through them. Easy as pie.

If you hate the sound of your own voice, you can even hire somebody to voice over your content. There really is no excuse for not at least nailing these two or three ways to deliver your message.

We still consume content in vastly different ways

Don't forget the rest

Just because text, audio and video are the kings of content and the preference of most readers, doesn't mean we don't consume content in other ways.

As you'll see from the study above, some people still prefer their content in powerpoint slides, hard magazine copies, courses, infographics and even longer articles or reports. This puts to bed the blanket notion that everybody has a measly eight second attention span.

Again, if you're somebody trying to reach as many of us digital dwellers as possible, here's a simple list showing how you'd hit a home run with every piece of your content:

• Save every article you produce as a PDF and allow your readers to download it for future reading (this is also a great way to build an email list of hungry fans)
• Send emails to people who have requested content that way
• Save your articles as presentations and share them on platforms such as SlideShare.
• Combine your articles and turn them into a course.

The options are limitless and the great thing is that you only need to create the content once too.

It would only be right that the moral of this story ends in the way it began. With our little sea friends being used as a metaphor. The more content you create, the more goldfish you'll catch who will give you their full attention. And it will surely be more than the eight seconds claimed.

Finally, if you've been worried that you're a strange consumer of content, don't be. The study by Source Global shows we're all still wonderfully different, and that is as far reaching as our content consumption.