The Attention Economy: The Natural Economy of the Net
If the Web and the Net can be viewed as spaces in which we will increasingly live our lives, the economic laws we will live under have to be natural to this new space. These laws turn out to be quite different from what the old economics teaches, or what rubrics such as “the information age” suggest. What counts most is what is most scarce now, namely attention. The attention economy brings with it its own kind of wealth, its own class divisions – stars vs. fans – and its own forms of property, all of which make it incompatible with the industrial-money-market based economy it bids fair to replace. Success will come to those who best accommodate to this new reality.
In following up on something I got at Wade’s ‘blog, I was drawn back to this notion of the Attention Economy (such a timely notion there were two books with the same title published right about the same time last summer).
The Attention Economy books (via Google)
The idea is summed in the extract quoted above but I have had two different pieces of news cross my path in the past 24 hours that reinforce it. One was the article Wade linked to (one of the premises being that watching commercial TV is an implicit contract to watch the ads and technology or methods that skip the spots are a breach of that contract) and the other was a piece on NPR about the slow rollout of High Definition TV. I didn’t catch the whole piece but the part that intrigued me was the conversation with what they called a SuperWatcher, someone who had gone to considerable trouble and expense to prepare for HDTV (he has a digital-ready TV and uses a satellite dish, since there are very few over the air digital signals at present). I couldn’t get over the idea of someone expending so much energy for the pleasure of higher visual quality images of what we already have. But I digress.
The other interesting bit was a quote from a station manager in Yakima, just over the Cascades from me, who isn’t doing any digital broadcasts at all, despite the FCC’s requirements to do so. In his words, it was going to cost $2 million to equip the station to go digital and there was no added value for advertisers. Better quality pictures won’t increase viewership, so why spend the money on it with no return?
Makes it clear who the real audience for commercial TV is, doesn’t it?
I’m rambling about two different but related points, as I see it. There is increasing pressure from media companies, such as my debt-saddled alma mater, AOL Time Warner, to squeeze more money from their operations. Since media companies make a big chunk of their revenue from ad sales, protecting that revenue stream is important. Any technology that permits ad removal is bad in that scenario, of course. How many of those devices have been sold, and how much revenue is lost as a result? Is this really a threat or is it just that people aren’t making as much as they’re like (a la the record companies and MP3)? Does anyone besides me wonder if the lack of HDTV buy-in by stations could be resolved by better programming? I mean, who needs high-definition sitcoms? Maybe some of the “creative” types in Burbank need to remember what people like Walt Disney did for Technicolor, and develop showcase programming for the new technology.
And of course, I started to write about how the new revenue stream is us, how we are going to see more and more advertising messages, anywhere people can think to put them, as the old tactics fail to deliver.
We already have ad flyers over the urinals in stores and restaurants to capture our eyeballs during those contemplative moments . . . where else?