Came here to say exactly this. People also listen to individual podcast episodes that clock in at 2 or 3 hours, and are hugely popular.

Movies are getting longer at the cinema too -- what used to be 85 minutes is now 150 minutes.

TikTok has not "won" at all. There's a place for content of all different lengths. The death of the attention span has been greatly exaggerated.

> The death of the attention span has been greatly exaggerated.

Spend 15 minutes with the median 7-30 year old and you’ll think differently. Yes it’s not everybody. But it’s clearly most of them.

With movies, I feel like that's a bit of return to form. I know lots of older greats were around 2-3 hours in length, and I feel like things moved to 90 minutes basically overnight around the 2000s. Though I feel like a lot of long recent movies are more padded, while older 2+ hour movies felt like they had to cut content to make it a reasonable length.

I suppose if I have to share the earth/air/roads with the brainrot plebs, they might as well subsidize my ad-free consumption of long-form podcasts hosted on YouTube.

These are definitely not the same. How many people are actually paying full attention to a 3 hour podcast?

The majority will be listening to it while on their commute, or at the gym, or doing chores around the house. My wife (a civil engineer) has a podcast going in the background even while working. I asked her how she actually manages to pay attention to it and she says that it's mostly for the background noise.

> Movies are getting longer at the cinema too -- what used to be 85 minutes is now 150 minutes.

Because these movies are not made for the cinema anymore, but for streaming platforms, where people can consume in the same way they consume their podcasts.