11 Feb 2007
Attention economics
…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it
(Simon 1971, p. 40-41).
Our attention span is a resource that can be measured in terms of scarcity. That is, the less attention we can spare, the higher we need to price it. It would be good to note that although most of us do not price our attention, there are businesses out there that price it for us.
Whenever we watch a TV commercial we are paying the owners of that channel with our attention in exchange for content. The channel owners then sell our attention to the advertisers which pay them “real” money in return. If you think about it, you’ll see that this example is valid across the board. Everyone wants a piece of our attention (usually in order to sell us something).
So, if attention is worth money, why go through a middle-man? Why not sell our attention directly?
This is what Root markets does. It’s a start up founded in 2005 by Entrepreneur Seth Goldstein. It allows us to track our own browsing habits (our click-stream) in a secure and accurate fashion and then posts it to a vault. We can then let advertisers/businesses buy our attention from us on the attention exchange market.
Instead of trying to lure us into clicking on an ad which advertises real-estate the advertiser will buy the identity of people that are browsing on real-estate sites, and the rights to offer them a business deal. They call this kind of technology MyWare (as opposed to SpyWare).
Or, as Mr. Goldestein put it:
Everybody else is spying on me, so I want to spy on myself.
Kudos! to that.
The model proposed by Mr. Goldstein will make it hard for businesses to bid for a person’s attention if they don’t know how much the attention of a single person is worth. It’s safe to assume that a student conducting research is worth less than a multi millionaire looking to buy land for his winter lodge. This problem will prevent us from actually trading with our attention because the buyer (the advertiser) won’t know the true value of our attention.
To solve this, Goldstein suggests that we can make other bits of information available along with our click-stream in order to become attractive to the advertisers. We can add our credit rating to our surf habits in order to raise our attention’s worth. I’d assume we can also add other bits of info such as our academic achievements, current employment status etc.
I’m guessing that companies like VeriSign could make big money selling user-certificates that validate our “attention rating”.
Regardless of whether an attention market will catch on or not, ideas such as this one provide a glimpse into the possiblities of the future web. And while true there is room to oppose the notion of selling our credit rating to the highest bidder, we need to remember that someone out there is already using this information whether we like it or not.
Personally speaking, I’d rather have control over what kind of information is made available, and I would certainly want to be paid for it.
…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it
(Simon 1971, p. 40-41).
Our attention span is a resource that can be measured in terms of scarcity. That is, the less attention we can spare, the higher we need to price it. It would be good to note that although most of us do not price our attention, there are businesses out there that price it for us.
Whenever we watch a TV commercial we are paying the owners of that channel with our attention in exchange for content. The channel owners then sell our attention to the advertisers which pay them “real” money in return. If you think about it, you’ll see that this example is valid across the board. Everyone wants a piece of our attention (usually in order to sell us something).
So, if attention is worth money, why go through a middle-man? Why not sell our attention directly?
This is what Root markets does. It’s a start up founded in 2005 by Entrepreneur Seth Goldstein. It allows us to track our own browsing habits (our click-stream) in a secure and accurate fashion and then posts it to a vault. We can then let advertisers/businesses buy our attention from us on the attention exchange market.
Instead of trying to lure us into clicking on an ad which advertises real-estate the advertiser will buy the identity of people that are browsing on real-estate sites, and the rights to offer them a business deal. They call this kind of technology MyWare (as opposed to SpyWare).
Or, as Mr. Goldestein put it:
Everybody else is spying on me, so I want to spy on myself.
Kudos! to that.
The model proposed by Mr. Goldstein will make it hard for businesses to bid for a person’s attention if they don’t know how much the attention of a single person is worth. It’s safe to assume that a student conducting research is worth less than a multi millionaire looking to buy land for his winter lodge. This problem will prevent us from actually trading with our attention because the buyer (the advertiser) won’t know the true value of our attention.
To solve this, Goldstein suggests that we can make other bits of information available along with our click-stream in order to become attractive to the advertisers. We can add our credit rating to our surf habits in order to raise our attention’s worth. I’d assume we can also add other bits of info such as our academic achievements, current employment status etc.
I’m guessing that companies like VeriSign could make big money selling user-certificates that validate our “attention rating”.
Regardless of whether an attention market will catch on or not, ideas such as this one provide a glimpse into the possiblities of the future web. And while true there is room to oppose the notion of selling our credit rating to the highest bidder, we need to remember that someone out there is already using this information whether we like it or not.
Personally speaking, I’d rather have control over what kind of information is made available, and I would certainly want to be paid for it.
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Attention Economy 
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