HN Explorer

Ask HN: Where does the attention economy end?

10 points by mlac ↗ HN
I can see how one's attention is valuable but hits a point of diminishing returns. At the extreme, one's attention is not valuable if that person spends his or her entire day consuming apps and not creating value (or working). His or her ad revenue will be worth less than someone with a job, if it is worth anything at all. This person will also use a lot of the organization's resources and have a high amount of "engagement" with the application.

This makes Facebook's shift to young adults [1] seem more clear - that group can spend as much time as they want on Facebook and consumption, and they can then spend their parents' income. It's a constant fresh source of income with buying power.

I roughly equate attention to time and energy - once it is spent, it is gone. On the whole, as billions of people spend their time and energy scrolling through ad-supported applications, their attention becomes less valuable over time. Do you think that the time and energy spent on ad-supported applications is pulling from users' productivity? Or just transferring it from other forms of recreation?

I don't quite think I'm hitting the mark here, but I'd like to know your thoughts on if the attention economy is sustainable in its current state. Have we hit peak "attention" and the only new users left are kids in middle school and high school? I think this would make for interesting discussion with recent headlines and revelations about the major companies in the space [2].

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/25/22745622/facebook-young-adults-refocusing-teams

[2] Impact from Apple on SNAP, Facebook revelations, HN headlines recently involving Google... it goes on.

15 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 17.6 ms ] thread
AnimalMuppet
Well, the attention economy can't grow much further. People only have 24 hours in a day, and some of it they spend sleeping. Sure, the rest of the time they're paying attention to something. But the amount of it that can be captured by the "attention economy" that hasn't already been captured is kind of limited. In the US, for example, can the attention economy double from here? I kind of doubt it. Those who are participating aren't going to give it twice as much time, and those who aren't, aren't going to suddenly start in large numbers.

Globally, the attention economy might increase more as more people come online, but that's a finite limit, too.

So we may not be at "peak attention economy", but we're not too far from it, in my view.

cratermoon
I'm not sure I trust the social media companies' own claims about how much reach and engagement they have. I suspect there are a lot more people who aren't captured than is believed in tech circles. This is almost certainly ignoring the vast areas of the world where the reach of technology is nothing like urban areas of the developed world.

But if the amount of attention captured is correct, approximately, and some substantial majority of the world's attention is captured, then we may have an "engagement bubble", and soon to face a crash in the value of attention, which could result in the major social media and adtech companies losing billions in value. I would expect to see ever-more predatory and manipulative strategies put in place to maximize the revenue extracted from engagement. There is already considerable effort being put into expanding the reach of the internet, for example StarLink, Facebook subsidizing "free internet"[1], and so forth.

1 https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/09/how-facebooks-free-i...

AnimalMuppet
I agree that it's going to get more predatory, manipulative, and frantic as they can't grow metrics any more.

The next step is going to be fractionalized attention. If I'm looking at my phone while you're playing an ad in the video I'm watching on my PC, then how much is my "attention" on the PC worth? About zero, because the ad doesn't actually have my attention. If I call up a web page, and it auto-plays five ad videos, how much is my view worth? Not much, because my attention is split five ways (six, if you count my attempts to stop all the auto-play videos so I can look at what I actually came to the page for). So they may grow the metrics by increasingly desperate measures, but they're going to cheapen what attention is worth by doing so.

On the other hand, actual, real, full, willing attention is valuable, and becoming more so. (Supply and demand, if nothing else - the demand for peoples' attention is increasing, the supply isn't.)

In fact (digression), it's so valuable that you should consider it as a Christmas present. Give your actual, full, willing, undivided attention to the people you care about. It's a rare and valuable gift.

cratermoon
A radical idea is to acknowledge that the user's attention has monetary value and pay them. Even a thousandth of a unit of the local currency per "like", comment, or share, to users would, if the actual reach and activity of social media is approximately accurate (~4 billion likes/day, ~4.7 billion shares) might generate enough backpressure on so-called engagement metrics to make the ad-revenue-driven social media consider how much their profits depend on the free work of their users. Remember the adage, "if you're not paying for the service, you're the product" and understand that the services that users (the product) provide in the service of ad sales deserve real compensation.

Either that, or tax the revenues of social media and its investors and put the money into actually improving the lives of ordinary people.

Or, most radically, consider the absolute absurdity, to put it mildly, of a business that makes a profit off the free labor of individuals and simply abolish the practice.

Gtex555
Well false claims of reach should be useless ideally, let me walk you through an example with a banner ad.

If I claim your ad on my website reaches 10,000 people but only 1000 click it then my 10,000 reach only has a clickthrough rate of 10 percent, so even I lie to someone else and say it has a reach of 100,000 but the same 1000 click then it will only have a 1 percent clickthrough rate. So the ultimate metric can not be fooled , maybe for a few months sure but I`ll be found out , in a perfect/rational world lol.

cratermoon
There are dozens of metrics[1], and few of them are tied to clickthrough. In the adtech business uses clickthrough rates for online advertising aren't considered a useful metric any more. Make what you will of that.

1 https://instapage.com/blog/key-advertising-metrics

Gtex555
damn, seems like the only way to verify the reach. CPC (cost per click) is still a think in ad though so that's good.
cratermoon
Social media and adtech have a vested interest in keeping advertisers thinking they are getting value, and ignoring the execrable click-through rates.

There was a time when it was genuinely believed that all this technology would let advertisers know that spending $X in ads would get Y sales for $Z revenue, and therefore know exactly what it costs to get a potential customer to buy something. This is probably a pipe dream.

Gtex555
Why do the companies paying for said ads fall for it if its so blatantly obvious, personally I think its either they have a way of checking the value of the ads (clickthrough rates/ conversions) or they are just stopping their competition from monopolizing the ad space.
Jugurtha
>Globally, the attention economy might increase more as more people come online, but that's a finite limit, too.

Well, a human's time is finite. To get more human time on the platform, you need to have more humans and/or a bigger share of one human's time.

Getting more people online has been facebook's playbook (deals with telcos, internet for everyone, etc). Getting a bigger share has also been in the playbook (engagement, notifications, etc).

For the next level of getting a bigger share of someone's time, however, you want to insert yourself in every hour of their daily life, not just entertainment. Insert yourself in their leisure time, in their working time, in their dreams. That's where VR/AR come to play, in my opinion, to make people spend as much of the finite time they are allocated on the platform.

version_five
I don't want to give anyone ideas, but there is still driving, sports / exercise, eating out (although many people probably spend their dates glued to the phone now), going to shows... probably lots of others I'm not thinking of. I think there's going to be a long tail of seeing what attention can be squeezed out of these and other currently "wasted" activities
lm28469
> His or her ad revenue will be worth less than someone with a job, if it is worth anything at all.

The ad industry is (mostly) a gigantic scam, it doesn't matter who sees or what interactions people have with ads, megacorps will still pay for them and will get their monthly "user engagement" report full of buzzwords and biased data.

Anyone working in this industry knows it

PaulHoule
It's been that way a long time.

Online advertising revealed that people were paying orders of magnitude too much for advertising on newspapers, radio, etc.

There have always been people who got such a thrill out of hearing their name on the radio that they set the prices for advertising independent of the value it creates.

mlac
OK - I’ve seen this view thrown around on here as well. Do you think this translates to political influence? In other words, is the concern that social media can influence elections overblown?
Gtex555
Advertising is like pay to play, while ads don't work all that well for the most part if everyone stopped paying for them save for one person, they'd be the only thing we`d ever see. So basically people pay for ads to stop anyone else from having a monopoly , that's why you see YouTube had those ExpressVPN and SquareSpace ads en masse, you inject a lot of money for one year on a single platform and have a mini monopoly(only way for ads to work).

What bearing does this have on the attention economy ? Well its like anything with perfect competition , gotta keep playing despite diminishing returns otherwise someone will have a monopoly on the market if you stop.

Hence why Lord Theil said competition is for losers!