Our fragmented attention spans are so fickle that if something doesn’t grab us in the first few seconds, we’re likely to turn away, writes Michelle Castillo. Research by Web performance monitoring company Catchpoint Systems suggests that news sites may be in trouble because publishers are putting too many assets on their Web pages, forcing the content and the advertisements to load too slowly. “We’ve got short attention spans, and at 1/100th of a second, our brain will begin to want to think about something else,” Vasiliou said.