The Return of the Long Watch
By Katy Arnold, Content Lead
For years, the internet has been telling us that nobody has the attention span for anything longer than 30 seconds.
Perhaps the internet was wrong.
The great irony of the creator economy in 2026 is that, just as short-form video has become almost impossibly sophisticated, there are signs that audiences are getting hungry for something it cannot easily provide: time.
Not another 17-second opinion. Or a GRWM cut into 11 jump edits. Something with a beginning, a middle, and a reason to stay.
That is what makes Holly Willoughby’s new YouTube series, Together, interesting. Not because it’s necessarily a runaway ratings success. It isn’t. The early numbers have been uneven, with the first episode reportedly drawing around 75,000 views before subsequent episodes fell considerably. But commercially, strategically and culturally, it’s a much more interesting experiment than the view count suggests.
Together is essentially a television programme that has escaped television. It’s a lifestyle series built around Holly, with celebrity guests, food, fashion, health, beauty and conversation without the constraints of a broadcaster. It’s unscripted, on demand and lives on YouTube. Holly herself has described the project as something she wants to build over time.
For marketers, the most interesting part about it isn’t the value of the presenter but the brand sitting alongside her. Voy, the digital healthcare business specialising in areas including weight management and women’s health. It’s an interesting partnership and placement to dissect.
Time is the Raw Material of Trust
The influencer economy has spent the last decade teaching us to think about people as distribution channels. A creator has an audience, and a brand has a product. The job is to put the product in front of the audience without making the whole thing feel like an advert. In 2026, this model feels rather small.
The biggest creators are no longer simply influencers. They’re media properties. They have formats, production companies, development slates, brand partnerships, podcasts, merchandise, loyal communities and, increasingly, the ability to create something that looks much more like entertainment than advertising.
Google itself is now describing creators as the entertainment industry rather than a separate “creator economy”, with YouTube at the centre of that shift. This changes the value equation. A 30-second TikTok can deliver enormous reach but a 30-minute piece of entertainment can do something different: it allows an audience to spend time with a person. And time is the raw material of trust.
Why Voy Makes Sense Here
Voy is not simply buying a few product mentions around Together. It’s positioning itself inside a broader world of lifestyle, health and change, which is a much more interesting proposition to audiences.
Holly’s programme is built around the territory where people make decisions about themselves: how they look, how they feel, what they eat, how they age, how they dress, how they manage their lives. Voy operates in similarly intimate territory, offering digital healthcare services including weight management, menopause and other areas of health.
The partnership therefore has a degree of contextual logic that a random celebrity endorsement doesn’t. But there is an important distinction here. Contextual relevance is not the same thing as credibility.
Voy has faced regulatory scrutiny over its marketing practices, including an MHRA review in 2026 relating to social media advertising for oral weight-loss medication. The company agreed to amend its marketing practices. That makes the sponsorship particularly worth watching. In health, the bar for trust is higher than in fashion or snacks. A celebrity’s warmth can open the door but it cannot substitute for clinical credibility, transparency or responsible advertising. And that’s precisely why the format matters.
Trust Needs More Than a Swipe
The most valuable thing Holly brings to Voy isn’t necessarily reach but the familiarity. Her popularity has waxed and waned in recent years but for millions of viewers she has spent years occupying their living room. She isn’t a creator who happened to go viral, but rather a figure that has an unusually long relationship with an audience.
However, that relationship has also evolved. Together is Holly’s attempt to become something slightly different from the polished daytime presenter audiences knew from This Morning. She has spoken about wanting more creative control and a more authentic version of herself. And long-form gives her the room to do that. A short-form influencer has to communicate personality almost instantly whereas long-form allows personality to accumulate.
There’s a slightly uncomfortable truth about the short-form revolution. We became really good at making content people could consume quickly but we haven’t necessarily got better at making things people want to remember.
UK data suggests the audiences are not choosing one format over another anyway. YouGov found that 39% of UK adults who regularly consume content watch short-form video multiple times a day while 38% watch long-form video at least once a day. Crucially, 57% of long-form viewers say they’re likely to watch a video all the way through.
This doesn’t indicate the popularity decline of TikTok but something more interesting: format fatigue is creating room for format variety.
Google describes today’s viewers as “omnivores”, moving between long-form, short-form and everything in between, across phones and TVs. The future isn’t short versus long but rather short for discovery and long for depth.
Even Gen Z is Sitting Down
There’s another particularly good case study in what Formula 1 is doing with Amelia Dimoldenberg. Passenger Princess is not a traditional sponsorship dressed up for YouTube; it’s a proper episodic entertainment format, created by Dimz Inc. in collaboration with F1, with Amelia driving (quite literally) the format. The first season generated more than 289 million views, and F1 has now brought it back for a second six-part season.
That’s pretty significant because F1 could have bought Amelia’s reach in a hundred easier ways. Instead, it has helped create something people actually choose to watch. The brand gets the association, the access and the cultural relevance; Amelia gets to make Amelia-shaped entertainment. It’s a useful model for where influencer partnerships are heading: less “here’s a creator talking about our brand”, more “here’s a show we’ve made with a creator that happens to make our brand more interesting.”
And the idea that long-form belongs to older audiences is increasingly difficult to defend. The same YouGov research found that 18–24-year-olds are actually the most frequent consumers of long-form video: 40% say they watch videos of 10 minutes or more multiple times a day, compared with just 11% of over-55s. Even more tellingly, 30% of 18–24s who watch long-form say they are very likely to watch it all the way through. Reuters Institute data points in the same direction: among 18–24-year-olds who watch news on YouTube, 52% watch videos longer than five minutes weekly, compared with 41% of over-55s.
So perhaps the story isn’t that young people have lost their attention spans but they’re rather becoming picky about where they spend their time. They’ll happily consume an endless stream of 15-second videos. And then spend 40 minutes with someone they actually care about.
Format Fatigue is Creating Room for Format Variety
For years, influencer marketing was sold as the antidote to traditional media but the next evolution may look remarkably like traditional media only with the creator at the centre.
A creator with a loyal audience can develop a format, build a world around it, bring in guests, attract a commercial partner and distribute directly. No broadcaster or commissioning editor required. And, importantly, no need to interrupt the entertainment with an advert if the brand can become part of the ecosystem around it.
That’s a considerably more sophisticated commercial proposition and explains why creator marketing is attracting serious money. US creator-marketing ad spend is projected to reach $44 billion in 2026, according to figures cited by Business Insider.
The question for brands is no longer simply: Which influencer should we hire? It’s becoming: What world can we build with them?
Long-Form Isn’t Coming Back Because it Never Really Left
Perhaps the bigger lesson from Together is not that audiences have suddenly rediscovered the joys of 40-minute YouTube videos. They actually never stopped watching them. YouTube remains enormous, with more than 2.7 billion monthly users globally, and brands are actually rediscovering its ability to generate sustained attention.
What’s really changing is the cultural perception of long-form content. It no longer feels like the opposite of social media but is the social media. And after a decade of being aggressively optimised for the next swipe, there’s something almost luxurious about watching people finish a thought. That may be the real opportunity for creators in 2027 and beyond.
The experiment points towards something bigger. Perhaps the influencer is growing up. And maybe after years of telling us that nobody has an attention span anymore the smartest creators have realised the opposite: People don’t hate long-form content, they hate wasting their time. Give them something worth staying for – and they just might.
Sources:
- YouGov. (2026). UK Media Consumption Trends in 2026: Short-Form vs Long-Form. Available online: https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/55033-uk-media-consumption-trends-in-2026-short-form-vs-long-form-video-consumption-insights
- Reuters Institute. (2026). From broadcast news to streaming and platforms: The changing landscape of news video. Available online: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2026/broadcast-streaming-platforms-changing-landscape-news-video
- Business Insider. (2026). Seeking nominations for the most innovative influencer marketers for brands in 2026. Available online: https://www.businessinsider.com/seeking-nominations-business-insider-top-influencer-marketers-for-brands-2026-2026-8
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