Great article, I had never looked at “attention” as a bankable resource. One small company that has built its entire model around this concept is spiralfrog.com. They literally give away legal MP3’s and Videos from mainstream artists in exchange for nothing more than the user’s attention. In fact, they purposely made it so you can only download 1 song at a time to maximize the duration of that attention span.

Thanks for a very insightful post Kevin.

Just a couple of random thoughts on your theme. Although some money is necessary and nice, if you gain attention to achieve your aims without money then you are saving the cut the government would get. So if some of your goals are to improve the environment, society or the generation that will pay our social security then you may forgo some money to help with your goals.

Many people ponder what product they can make or what service they can provide to create a successful business. If they forgo the boring mass marketed distractions that waste time and ask themselves what they really desire they have half the answer. The other half of the answer comes by developing the methods to achieve these desires quickly, easily and cheaply (perhaps even free). If they are able to do this they will certainly attract attention and as you point out the money will follow. The things you desire are probably the same things many others desire but they don’t know a convenient way to get.

Kevin, in reply to your question about when money does not follow attention: when money is not especially wanted or sought; when there is no suitable channel by which to convey money; when the person getting attention — JS Bach, say, or a suicide bomber — is dead.

In general, attention is often desired for its own sake; if you go to a karaoke bar with friends and start singing very entertainingly, you may get attention and applause, very gratifyingly, but not usually money. In any circle of friends or colleagues, a few may get a lot of attention, but this does not generally translate into money, though non-monetary favors of various sorts would be common.

As new forms of interpersonal connection on the Internet and the like (texting and Twitter, e.g.) proliferate, I think more and more of those we pay attention to will be hard to distinguish from friends, and handing over money to where our attention goes may seem increasingly odd under normal circumstances.

MIchael

@Goldhaber: Michael, do you have a sense of under what conditions attention does not pull money along? You mentioned infants and terrorists. Don’t infants eventually get money from their parents, and wouldn’t terrorists get money if there was an easy way to pay them?

@ Roger: You say, “People spend more of their time/attention on Yahoo than any other site, yet it is not the most profitable. “

Time not equal attention. I spend a lot of time in my car but I don’t give it much attention.

HI Kevin,

Thanks for the citation of my work. You always find neat ways to put things. As the old adage goes “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” People who want to see more recent thoughts of mine can start with my blog http://www.goldhaber.org Details on what attention is and how it works can be found at http://www.goldhaber.org/wp-contents/uploads/2007//Chap33.19.07.pdf

A few caveats on your piece:

1. Money doesn’t always follow attention, and often people just want attention for its own sake, not money. For instance, they write letters to the editor. Or they comment on others’ blogs. Babies are very good at getting attention; money doesn’t necessarily follow. Terrorists get lots of attention, which gives them followers, but not necessarily money. And so on.

2. Consuming stuff takes attention. The more attention we pay to messages that are not related to selling us stuff, the less ability to and interest in consuming more things.

3. Ads work only when they get us to buy something. As the Internet grows and captures more of our attention (see my “The Web as Black Hole” http://www.goldhaber.org/blog/?p=127 ) ads will eventually not bring enough money to cover everything, or not very well. Many web sites just ask for money directly.

4. I still think money is not fundamental to the pure Attention Economy to which we still seem to be headed. I have attempted to develop an index that allows comparison of different types of economy, according to which the AE is already much bigger than the money economy. See http://goldhaber.org/blog/?p=80 . Also, the money econmy is now in trouble. See http://goldhaber.org/blog/?p=129 .

Best,

Michael

great article! with the internet, it’s easy for everyone to get his/her fifteen minutes. the challenge is how to make yourself last more than the fifteen minutes.

My take on this was that “Attention is the first currency of the digital realm” (January 2008)

http://scilib.typepad.com/sciencelibrarypad/2008/01/the-currencies.html

Agreed, where attention goes money goes. As a result, marketing trumped engineering and the quality of many products lowered. Inkjet printers are one example. We now get cheaper (in both senses of the word) printers with hyped virtues that are less durable, and with more expensive consumables. My twenty year old inkjet works flawlessly; several of my newer inkjets self-destructed after 2-3 years. So many things have become “throw away” rather than repairable. Your automobile is now filled with “throw away” parts that use to be repairable. I gave away my 25-year-old working 1960s dishwasher; my mid-1990s dishwasher started rusting out from the inside within five years. Sure, we are flooded with products and services. But, the integrity of the purveyors has declined, and consumer loyalty with it.

Herbert Simon identified in 1971 attention as the scarce resource of the information age:

“…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” Source: Simon, H. A. (1971), “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World”

John Boyd formulated in the 80s with the OODA loop a strategy of winning and loosing that helps also to understand the rules of the fight for attention, something that Robert Scoble called for his niche of tech-news blogging the “Techmeme Game”.

Some details here: http://www.line-of-reasoning.com/issues/the-essence-of-information-based-human-creativity-and-how-robert-scobles-techmeme-game-is-related-to-john-boyds-military-strategy/

Professor Kelly,

I think you could extend your piece further by incorporating something more. For instance, TOO MUCH attention on a celebrity tends to devalue that celebrity brand by spreading the butter thin, but if you’re really clever, you can energise the attention machine at the right time/frequency for maximum impact. A bit like terrorists do…

Have you any thoughts about that?

The attention-to-money conversion mechanism is easiest to understand in advertising, it’s most raw form.

There are three parties involved: Advertiser: has dollars, wants attention. Publisher: has interesting stuff, wants dollars. Viewer: has attention, wants interesting stuff.

The viewer gives attention to the publisher, who then directs a portion of the attention to the advertiser in exchange for money.

The advertiser then converts that attention into dollars in the form of sales.

The challenge for everyone is that we are getting better and better at creating “interesting stuff” but there is a finite supply of attention. Our dynamic range of “interesting” is lessening, as everything in the technium is more perfectly designed to grab attention.

See: http://wanderingstan.com/2006-07-17/attentiontodollarsandother_exchanges

Definitely agree that money generally follows attention, but it’s not just that. People spend more of their time/attention on Yahoo than any other site, yet it is not the most profitable.

yes of course, energy follows intention …

but to those who say it is not scientific, is too new-agey, they will want to beat you up

@Paul: I like that. Perhaps it should be “The flow of attention through a system tends to monetize that system.”

@Michael: Goldhaber was an influence. I edited the piece he did for Wired, I believe before the First Monday version. He suggested money would disappear. I always thought it was the most plausible impossible idea I had ever heard.

Great article, it held my attention all the way through.

Michael Goldhaber has a thought-provoking article on the attention economy that you may enjoy if you haven’t seen it:

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue2_4/goldhaber/

It’s more than ten years old now, but I still find it fresh and provocative. Goldhaber seems to believe that attention will eventually replace (or exist alongside) conventional currency. His arguments for the early stages of this process are along similar lines to the argument in your blog post, although not as well fleshed out.

Sounds like a corollary of the old Whole Earth dictum: “The flow of energy through a system tends to organize that system.”