Our Awareness is a Commodity
Just like a network economy, an attention economy ‘flips’ the rules and systems of traditional industrialist economies, placing value in different areas of existing markets and business practices. As stated in the previous section, an industrial economy develops around the buying and selling of goods or services and while this is still an important aspect of online trading, “material goods and the acts of producing them are only secondary in an attention economy.” (Goldhaber, 1997).
Michael Goldhaber proposes that we make many decisions concerning ‘where and towards whom’ our attention is focused and that this is ‘typical of a growing proportion of our society’ (Goldhaber, 1997). An attention economy monopolizes on this focus and rewards the successful gaining of a potential customer’s attention. In the same way that print and broadcast media are able to refocus our attention onto adverts; successfully gaining a user’s attention equals dollars in an online attention economy. When we think of the many millions of internet users worldwide we can appreciate the potential advertising space that is available to online businesses and companies as a way of generating revenue.
Attention is a large and important part of any marketplace. The need for sellers to gain the attention of potential customers, or to raise the public awareness of products and services has played a central and continual role in industrial and traditional economies throughout history. This is obvious when we think of globally recognized brands and marketing campaigns such as Nike and the slogan ‘Just Do It’, yet it is equally important to a home business selling a small number of goods online. Basically, to reach a chosen market sellers need to gain the attention of prospective buyers.
Global Attention and the Electronic Marketplace
Businesses of any size can market to individual and global audiences by utilizing the internet, although successfully gaining the attention of these would-be customers is not necessarily an easy task. “There is something else that moves through the Net, flowing in the opposite direction from information, namely attention” (Goldhaber, 1997); and with so much information online, it can be hard to gain a users attention. Amongst the large numbers of users and information, the ability to capture the user’s awareness becomes a valuable commodity and a central part of online trading. Online, “attention is a scarce resource: attention is a bit limited and fragmented” (Shah, 2009).
The internet presents a unique opportunity for sellers, buyers and advertisers to interact, where value is created “by reducing the costs of transmitting information” (Rifkin, 2001). Online trading sees new systems of economics developing which both expand upon and completely change traditional commerce and business structures. Information, networks and attention have become major commodities within this new economy, taking on a more important and centralized role through the ubiquity of internet use within modern societies.
These new systems of economics which now dominate internet commerce require us “to think in wholly new economic terms, for we are entering an entirely new kind of economy.” (Goldhaber, 1997). The Attention Economy is structured around generating revenue through gaining a users attention amongst the free services and media found on the internet. Online businesses can support and offer these free services through advertising, marketing and the sharing of resources. This is an evolution of traditional advertising and business which taps into the millions of potential viewers and customers online.
YouTube and the Attention Economy
YouTube, the third most visited website on the internet (Alexa, 2010), generates money via advertising and sponsorship. YouTube’s company net worth and massive economic successes show the positive effects which grow from network and attention based business models that share and freely pass on resources and information. This is a web service that generates huge amounts of traffic and masses of valuable user attention, yet it is well documented in the media as making negative profits in actual cash flow. The valuable resource here is the attention of the users and the potential advertising space which could easily reach them via Youtube. This is the nature of an attention economy, where value is placed on the ability to gain a users awareness - not only how much money they will spend.
