Attention is the world's most valuable resource. After all, time is the only thing we have that is perfectly finite. But the global market for attention — the attention economy — is broken. Why?
Attention is the world's most valuable resource.
Time is the only thing we have that is perfectly finite. But the global market for attention – the attention economy – is broken. Why?
The price of attention is distorted.
Advertising, the market for buying and selling attention, is rampant with fraud. A reported 40%+ of internet activity is fake, but advertising is still priced based on real people taking real actions.
The measurement of attention is outdated.
The market has not figured out how to measure quality attention and instead resorts to overly simplistic metrics — “impressions” are binary, “visitors” don’t account for engagement, and “clicks” can be gamified. There is no incentive to measure the right KPIs.
The battle for attention leads to low-quality content.
Platforms are incentivized to generate more and more high-margin inventory. This results in low-cost, low-quality media like clickbait headlines and polarizing stories.
The platforms optimize for immediate margin instead of long-term value for brands.
Brands suffer as margin accrues to the platform that offers the cheapest price. Without strong brands, consumer trust erodes.
Today’s consumers demand something better.
The leading social platforms are emotionally manipulative, proven to cause depression and anxiety, and built to be addictive. The organic food market grew to $45B+ when consumers began to care what they put into their bodies. The organic media market that emerges next has equal or greater potential as consumers care more about what they put into their brains.
This yields a massive investment opportunity.
As the attention economy corrects, a new generation of strong brands and businesses with permission to curate on behalf of consumers will matter more than ever before. The market opportunity today is reminiscent of the impact of the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008.
The future of attention is high-quality, curated communities and technologies that create long-term value.
Low-quality technologies dull us, undermine our sense of community, prioritize immediate gratification, extract our time and money, pollute our minds and environment, and deplete our limited resources.