Attention Economy
exploring the inner workings and dynamics of companies building products engineered to hook us, addict us, and hijack our attention to sell more ad inventory
sari and
Attention Economy
insught from Eugene Wei on the incentives of ad-based social networks:
to raise your revenue as a social media company monetizing from ads (CPM), you have to drive the M part up, because the C is going down. And that means more and more we see all these companies fighting to be more addictive and entertaining.
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
sublimetwitter.com
I want to be realistic about how the mind works today, which is on multiple streams. And this situation isn’t going to change. We can set up full attention as an ideal, but our digital devices are producing a different way of attending.
Dirt • Dirt: Disordered Attention
How we allocate our attention defines us even more than our purchases do. People have different amounts of money, so the things we buy don’t reflect values in the same way for everyone. The same purchase might represent a tremendous sacrifice for one person and a mere afterthought to another. But we all have the same widow’s mite of attention to distribute among the many things competing for it: family, friends, education, health, careers, church, politics, great books, lousy books, clickbait headlines, and viral posts about ridiculous people doing ridiculous things for no particular reason. Our limited attention budget forces us to make choices, and those choices both reveal our values and create our characters.
