The Attention Economy: An Overview - ReadWriteWeb - About

The web sites that contain content relevant to us have a big incentive to make sure that we find it.

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It is no secret that we live in an information overload age. The explosion of new types of information online is a double-edged sword. We both enjoy and drown in news, blogs, podcasts, photos, videos and cool MySpace pages.

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Because of this information explosion, we no longer read - we skim. The news that used to last a day now lasts just a few hours, simply because we need to pay attention to the new news. So it is becoming increasingly difficult to juggle all the news sources and keep on top of things. Which brings us to the law of information, stated first by Herbert Simon: the rapid growth of information causes scarcity of attention.

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Economics of Attention

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When information is abundant, the false positives are very costly - they are basically deal breakers.

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The idea behind the Attention Economy is to create a marketplace where consumers are happy, because if they are shown relevant information - then retailers are happy too, because happy consumers spend money!

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The basic ideas behind the Attention Economy are simple. Such an economy facilitates a marketplace where consumers agree to receives services in exchange for their attention. The ultimate purpose is of course to sell something to the consumer, but the selling does not need to be direct and does not need to be instant.

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It is important to realize that the key ingredient in the attention game is relevancy. As long as a consumer sees relevant content, he/she is going to stick around - and that creates more opportunities to sell.

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it is not possible for sites to generate relevant, personalized content unless they know the user

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Another key ingredient of the Attention Economy is privacy. The challenge is not just to protect consumers information, the challenge is to put the user in control of her information. The notion that in an Attention Economy, a user's information is up for grabs and can be bought and sold is misinformed. Instead, the user chooses what services he/she wants to receive, in exchange for their attention information. To help message these ideas and to protect consumers, Steve Gillmor and Seth Goldstein founded an organization called AttentionTrust.

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The founders of AttentionTrust succeeded in defining a simple, elegant, yet encompassing set of principles that define the rules of the game, by outlining the basic consumer rights in the AttentionEconomy:

Property: You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish. You have CONTROL.
Mobility: You can securely move your attention wherever you want, whenever you want to. You have the ability to TRANSFER your attention.
Economy: You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return. Your attention has WORTH.
Transparency: You can see exactly how your attention is being used.

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For example, it follows from the rules that services should provide a way for users to export their information. Another consequence of the rules is that a user should be able to request cancellation of their account and deletion of all their information.

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Here are some of the important issues that need to be addressed:

Silos: User information needs to be freed from proprietary silos
Round Table: The industry needs to create a round table, to enable organizations to govern both the business and technical aspects of the attention economy (think Java Community Process).
Education: People need to be educated about the value of their attention and the principles of attention economy. Avoiding privacy concerns will not work, instead they need to be tackled head on.

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AttentionTrust has created a Firefox add-on called AttentionRecorder which captures clickstream and redirects to a vault. The user also has a choice of where to store the data. A standard protocol between the attention capturing software and storage software ensures that users have the choice.

The user information that is stored in the database can be accessed by trusted services. These services, approved by the user in advance, have the opportunity to take advantage of the user information to deliver personalization.

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When information is abundant, the false positives are very costly - they are basically deal breakers. Consumers happily leave sites, knowing there are a ton of alternatives out there. Unfortunately, this becomes a lose-lose situation, because if consumers rarely find satisfying experiences then retailers won't get consumer dollars. The idea behind the Attention Economy is to create a marketplace where consumers are happy, because if they are shown relevant information - then retailers are happy too, because happy consumers spend money!

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Because of this information explosion, we no longer read - we skim. The news that used to last a day now lasts just a few hours, simply because we need to pay attention to the new news. So it is becoming increasingly difficult to juggle all the news sources and keep on top of things. Which brings us to the law of information, stated first by Herbert Simon: the rapid growth of information causes scarcity of attention.

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Things get more interesting when we realize that our attention crisis is not only our problem. It is also a big problem for news sites, blogs, search engines and online retailers. Our scarcity of attention hurts their economics. The web sites that contain content relevant to us have a big incentive to make sure that we find it.

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Things get more interesting when we realize that our attention crisis is not only our problem. It is also a big problem for news sites, blogs, search engines and online retailers. Our scarcity of attention hurts their economics. The web sites that contain content relevant to us have a big incentive to make sure that we find it.

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the rapid growth of information causes scarcity of attention.

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Things get more interesting when we realize that our attention crisis is not only our problem. It is also a big problem for news sites, blogs, search engines and online retailers. Our scarcity of attention hurts their economics. The web sites that contain content relevant to us have a big incentive to make sure that we find it. Consider this scenario. You navigate to a news site and start reading the headlines. What is the likelihood that you leave if you see an irrelevant headline? High. Another example. You go to Netflix and look at movie recommendations. What is the likelihood that you will stop browsing after Netflix shows you a movie you do not like? Again, very high.

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The idea behind the Attention Economy is to create a marketplace where consumers are happy, because if they are shown relevant information - then retailers are happy too, because happy consumers spend money!

Highlighted by jackie

Such an economy facilitates a marketplace where consumers agree to receives services in exchange for their attention. The ultimate purpose is of course to sell something to the consumer, but the selling does not need to be direct and does not need to be instant.

Highlighted by jackie

It is important to realize that the key ingredient in the attention game is relevancy.

Highlighted by jackie

However, it is not possible for sites to generate relevant, personalized content unless they know the user. To personalize, web sites need to know you: your browsing history, the books you like, the wines you drink, the music you listening to, etc. The more information the better.

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Another key ingredient of the Attention Economy is privacy.

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The challenge is not just to protect consumers information, the challenge is to put the user in control of her information.

Highlighted by jackie

in an Attention Economy, a user's information is up for grabs and can be bought and sold is misinformed. Instead, the user chooses what services he/she wants to receive, in exchange for their attention information

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Ideally, a body of standards and protocols should be the technological foundation of the Attention Economy.

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AttentionTrust has created a Firefox add-on called AttentionRecorder

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the law of information, stated first by Herbert Simon: the rapid growth of information causes scarcity of attention.

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It is no secret that we live in an information overload age

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It is also a big problem for news sites, blogs, search engines and online retailers. Our scarcity of attention hurts their economics. The web sites that contain content relevant to us have a big incentive to make sure that we find it.

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I am glad I found this article, it gave me plenty food for thought.

To me, the attention economy described here is just a meta-economy and therefore simply postpones the problem of information overload. Currently, web 2.0 is taking over web 1.0 and soon a need for web 3.0 will emerge. Attention economy may help towards 3.0, but I'm afraid one cannot circumvent the laws of entropy and information simply by tricking, rearranging or reorganising information into successive meta-levels.

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on 2008-12-25 by youssss

Great comment linking web 3.0 and attention economy and information overload.

The Attention Economy: An Overview - ReadWriteWeb

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on 2008-12-25 by youssss

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