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.
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.
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
Once I started to think in terms of TTI, it upended the entire concept of attention for me and forced me to acknowledge that maybe people’s attention spans weren’t getting shorter after all.
Framed through the lens of TTI, audiences don’t suffer from a dilemma of shortened attention spans, but rather a dilemma of increased choice (see the abundance crisis above).
Sometimes we don’t quite process that billions of people on the planet get unlimited entertainment, voice and video calling, maps, restaurant reviews, weather, news, an encyclopedia, mail, messaging, and more for *free* just because 1-2% of us click an ad every now and then.
Aaron Levietwitter.com