Attention Economy

A Attention Economy is an economic market that treats human attention as a scarce commodity.

• Context:
  • It can (typically) lead to businesses competing to capture and monetize Human Attention.
  • It can (typically) operate through Advertising-Driven Business Models.
  • It can (often) utilize methods that provoke emotional responses and maintain user engagement, such as: Clickbait, Sensationalized Content, and frequent Social Media Notifications
  • It can leverage the influence of social media personalities in Influencer Marketing, where these influencers direct their audience's attention to advertised products or services.
  • It can be exemplified by various markets such as the Streaming Video Market, Social Media Market, and Online Video Gaming Market, each relying on attention capture to drive their economic engines.
  • It can lead to phenomena like Excessive Technology Use, as platforms design their interfaces and notifications to maximize user engagement at the cost of user well-being.
  • ...
• Example(s):
  • a Streaming Video Market like Netflix that, while subscription-based, also competes in capturing viewer attention to ensure prolonged engagements and subscriptions.
  • a Social Media Market platform like Facebook, where user engagement through comments, likes, and shares is crucial for advertising revenue.
  • an Online Video Gaming Market service like Twitch where both the platform and its streamers vie for viewer attention through engaging content and interactive features.
  • ...
• Counter-Example(s):
  • Subscription-Based Models like Netflix and Spotify, which prioritize subscriber retention through quality content over the simple maximization of user attention.
  • Public Broadcasting entities like PBS or BBC, focusing on content that serves the public interest without the primary aim of maximizing advertising revenue.
  • Pay-Per-View models and Traditional Retail stores that prioritize direct sales and perceived content value over just capturing transient attention.
  • ...
• See: Economic Market, Human Attention, Scarce Commodity, Advertising-Driven Business Model, Digital Platform, Social Media Network, Search Engine, Influencer Marketing, Streaming Video Market, Social Media Market, Online Video Gaming Market, Excessive Technology Use

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References

2024

• (Wikipedia, 2024) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy Retrieved:2024-5-14.
  • Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems.

2021

• (Wikipedia, 2021) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/attention_economy Retrieved:2021-1-15.
  • Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems. According to Matthew Crawford, "Attention is a resource—a person has only so much of it.”

    In this perspective Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck define the concept of attention as:

    Attention is focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act.

    As content has grown increasingly abundant and immediately available, attention becomes the limiting factor in the consumption of information. A strong trigger of this effect is that the mental capability of humans is limited and the receptiveness of information is hence limited as well. Attention allows information to be filtered such that the most important information can be extracted from the environment while irrelevant details are left out. Software applications either explicitly or implicitly take attention economy into consideration in their user interface design based on the realization that if it takes the user too long to locate something, they will find it through another application. This is done, for instance, by creating filters to make sure viewers are presented with information that is most relevant, of interest, and personalized based on past Web search history.

2020

• (Turel & Ferguson, 2020) ⇒ Ofir Turel, and Christopher Ferguson. (2020). “Excessive Use of Technology: Can Tech Providers Be the Culprits?.” In: Communications of the ACM, 64(1).
  • QUOTE: ... The influx of hedonic online services (including video streaming, social media, video games) has created rather fierce competition for people's attention, in what is termed the “attention economy” — in which every minute of attention and engagement tech companies can "squeeze" out of users counts. To compete in this environment, tech companies, intentionally or unintentionally, have adapted practices that have capitalized on varying features of human decision making and brain physiology to cultivate automatic, and uninterrupted use. ...

2001

• (Davenport & Beck, 2001) ⇒ Thomas H. Davenport, and John C. Beck. (2001). “The Attention Economy.” Ubiquity 2001.
  • QUOTE: ... Rob and the rest of us live in an attention economy. In this new economy, capital, labor, information, and knowledge are all in plentiful supply. It's easy to start a business, to get access to customers and markets, to develop a strategy, to put up a Web site, to design ads and commercials. What's in short supply is human attention. Telecommunications bandwidth is not a problem, but human bandwidth is. At one point, software magnates had the ambition to put "information at your fingertips.” Now we've got it, and in vast quantities. But no one will be informed by it, learn from it, or act on it unless they've got some free attention to devote to the information. Unfortunately, most organizations have precious little attention to spare. This leads us to a key principle of attention management.

    DEFICIT PRINCIPLE: Before you can manage attention, you need to understand just how depleted these resources are for organizations and individuals.

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