🙈 Content Blindness:
When users skip over certain parts of the screen.
YouTube
5-second adverts
Ad effectiveness
When exposed to similar or identical content, people will subconsciously pay less and less attention to it.
This happens in both the short and long terms.
Short term (reactive):
On sequential pages (e.g., a sign-up form), if you have lots of very similar content, people will skim-read it at best—or just ignore it entirely.
Long term (habitual):
People are used to the common advertising spaces on the internet (e.g., sidebar ads), and they'll pay less attention to it.
✅ Input quality
If you're asking very similar questions, people might not notice the nuances.
This is especially a problem during onboarding and user research.
✅ Attention & interest
People will ignore things that look like duplicate content.
Over time, people become familiar with (and able to predict) YouTube videos having an un-skippable 5-second playback of an advert.
Because you can predict the advert, you'll pay less attention when it plays.
i.e., you've become somewhat blind to the message of the advert (unless it really grabs you).
Advertising on social media is so effective, because adverts look very similar to real content.
It's intentional, so that the user cannot easily (and immediately) determine what tweets are content, and which are adverts.
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