For years, we’ve been hearing about the “great disappearing attention span” of the broader population when it comes to how people consume information.

Business-to-business practitioners were supposedly different – particularly the ones who are decision-makers or influencers concerning their companies’ consequential purchases.

The assumption has been that people are more careful or deliberative when they’re buying high-ticket items on behalf of their employer — if only for the “CYA factor.”

But new information is casting some doubt on this time-honored assumption.

According to a communique published this past month by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), the average length of B-to-B videos has shrunk by approximately one-third in just the past few years.

Whereas the typical B-to-B video used to be around six minutes long, it’s now fallen to just over four minutes in duration.

On the plus side, due to those shorter times a larger percentage of viewers are watching all the way to the end of B-to-B videos. Even so, the proportion doing so is only around half (52%, up from approximately 46%).

And if a B-to-B video is shorter than 60 seconds in duration, an even larger proportion of viewers watches the entire video — typically nearly 70%.

It would appear that short attention span characteristics have leeched into the business realm as well:  To have the greater impact in B-to-B video communications these days, “less is more.”