In the attention economy, attention is not only a resource but a currency.
As of April 2023, there were 5.18 billion internet users worldwide, which amounted to 64.6 percent of the global population. With new and existing technologies on the market, the internet has changed business operations, and it has only accelerated the speed at which information is churned out globally.
There are numerous reports on the impact of the internet on e-commerce and shaping consumer choices, which brings us to our question today, how much attention does the economy pay to shaping our choices as consumers in the new age of information?
The concept of attention economy was first coined in the late 1960s by Herbert A. Simon, characterizing the problem of information overload as an economic one. However, the concept has become increasingly popular with the rise of the internet, making content (supply) increasingly abundant and immediately available, and attention becoming the limiting factor in the consumption of information. In the attention economy, attention is not only a resource but a currency: users pay for a service with their attention. Simon posited that attention was the “bottleneck of human thought” that limits both what we can perceive in stimulating environments and what we can do.
Being online today means that users of social media platforms, or consumers of the internet, are exposed to between 6,000 and 10,000 advertisements a day, as reported by Forbes. In the attention economy, for brands, corporations, and businesses, time spent on the internet by consumers translates to money.
The pandemic compelled us all to become active users of the internet and establish newer forms of communication channels through various social media platforms. As workplaces, businesses, and even our leisure habits began to establish avenues on the internet for connection and collaboration, our attention has become an important source for driving up sales and influencing.
Social media platforms are hubs for advertising, targeting advertisements based on cookies, age, demographic, and location. The attention economy has given rise to newer forms of advertising such as influencer marketing on popular social media sites. Small and big brands now understand the importance of reining in potential customers, and this is done through collaborating with influencers to increase brand visibility and target the followers of the influencer.
The UN Economists Network explores how our attention has translated into hard currency for big tech companies. The rise of the internet in the 1990s has led to a significant increase in the “price of attention,” while the cost of information has become relatively cheap. In response, the industry introduced new technologies to automate online data collection and analyse user interactions, known as “big data,” which has driven much of online traffic since the 2010s.
The addition of artificial intelligence (AI) to automate the internet is equivalent to adding hundreds of millions of workers in the form of online robots, overcoming the constraints of processing data. Content management technologies have added much value to data, allowing entirely new data-focused business models, but they have also led to an information overload for systems and individuals.
In 2009, influencer marketing was so commonplace in the US that this form of marketing was pushed for regulations and came under the Mommy-blogger law according to McKinsey and Co. in 2023. The influencer marketing industry has ballooned into a $21.1 billion industry. The Indian government released regulations specifically directed towards ‘health care-related endorsements’ making it mandatory for influencers to disclose marketing deals. It is no coincidence that today attention drives up sales, say, for example, the rise of booktok, a subcommunity of users on TikTok and Instagram that reviews books and famous pieces of literature. Influencers in the booktok community often leverage trending audios to bring their audience’s attention to their new, favourite read.
The bandwagon effect enables influencers to circulate and popularise works of literature that would otherwise be missed by readers in general. Authors, music artists, and celebrities are now leveraging social media platforms to expand their reach.
In this war for attention, especially when our attention is crucial to driving up sales and an important factor in consumerism, big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Instagram, and YouTube have all adopted algorithms that direct us towards recommended content and unskippable ads on their platforms that demand our attention.
Big or small brands, today every enterprise depends on eyeballs and clicks to generate revenue. It is imperative to understand that in our time spent on the internet, our attention is directed towards these social media platforms, and the content circulated on them is making the biggest returns to these companies. Their business and revenue models are fashioned after this, which makes our ‘attention’ economical today.
