by Javier Palenque
Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) is a wide-eyed, blue tang fish who suffers from memory loss every 10 seconds or so. The one thing she can remember is that she somehow became separated from her parents as a child. She has a very low attention span and she is a major problem for the brilliant USTA. In the last decade, the average American’s attention span dropped from 12 to 8 seconds according to a 2015 Microsoft study. This is of course a major shift in the way media, events, and products, in general, are consumed. But for the brilliant USTA executives, who do not consider this to be important, they are still on their mission to increase the audience for the US Open sometime in the next 100 years, even though year after year the audience sizes in person and online have gotten smaller and older. So let me help these brilliant people see their product from the real business world perspective, not from the welfare recipient perspective which is of course biased and politically correct. I am a no nonsense person I will tell you as it is.
On average, best-of-3 tennis matches last about 90 minutes, while best-of-5 matches last 2 hours and 45 minutes. This means that on an average tournament the attention span for the audience to watch a regular match has to be approximately 5400 seconds or 67,500% more than the current population is used to. Now consider that same logic…
