66% of people say they're more selective than a year ago. That one number explains almost everything.
I've spent four weeks writing about AI agents, TikTok Shop, retail media, resale, dark social and the collapse of the creator middle class.
Underneath all of it is one number.
66% of people say they're more selective about the content they engage with than they were a year ago.
That's it. That's the whole environment.
Every trend I've covered is a downstream effect of attention becoming scarce while supply became infinite. AI slop backlash? Selectivity. 76% of TikTok creators under 1,000 views? Selectivity. Dark social? People retreating to places where the signal-to-noise is better. Experiential? Buying attention with a room instead of an impression. Agentic commerce? Outsourcing the selecting.
The case FOR treating this as a crisis:
Reach is getting more expensive across every channel simultaneously, and there's no version of the next five years where that reverses
The tactics that worked in the abundance era — volume, hooks, engagement bait — are now actively penalised. 23% of people name engagement bait as their top complaint about brand content
Most marketing teams are structured, staffed and measured for a world that no longer exists
The case AGAINST panicking:
Selectivity cuts both ways. When people are choosy, being chosen is worth dramatically more. Engaged audiences are more valuable than they've ever been
The bar for standing out is arguably lower than it's been in a decade, because so much of what's published is machine-average
40% of people are actively asking brands to teach them something. That's a very clear brief and most companies aren't filling it
Where I land: stop optimising for being seen and start optimising for being chosen.
Fewer things. Sharper opinions. Named humans. Real numbers. Something to disagree with. That's a strategy that works in an attention recession and it happens to be the same strategy that worked before the algorithms — which should tell you something.
Four weeks of trends, one conclusion: the fundamentals came back because the shortcuts stopped working.
Last question, and I want real answers: what's the one piece of content you actually stopped scrolling for this month — and what made you stop?
Notes on the data
That's four weeks of trends. If you want the thread, the pillars were: AI and authenticity, agentic commerce, the creator middle class, experiential, search fragmentation, retail media, value-seeking, and dark social.
One thing I learned writing them: at least four widely-quoted industry stats have no primary source. I've flagged them as I went. If you spot one I missed, tell me — I'd rather be corrected than quoted.