Attention economy
Encyclopedia
Attention economics is an approach to the management of information
that treats human attention
as a scarce commodity
, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems.
In this perspective Thomas H. Davenport
and J. C. Beck define the concept of attention
as:
As content has grown increasingly abundant and immediately available, attention becomes the limiting factor
in the consumption of information. Attention economics applies insights from other areas of economic theory to enable content consumers, producers, and intermediaries to better mediate and manage the flow of information in light of the scarcity of consumer attention.
A number of software and web-applications either explicitly or implicitly take attention economy into consideration in their design, based on the realization that if it takes the user too long to locate something, they will find it through another application. This is done, for instance, by creating filters to make sure the first content a viewer sees is relevant, of interest, or with the approval of demographics.
was perhaps the first person to articulate the concept of attention economics when he wrote:
He noted that many designers of information systems incorrectly represented their design problem as information scarcity rather than attention scarcity, and as a result they built systems that excelled at providing more and more information to people, when what was really needed were systems that excelled at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information .
In recent years, Simon's characterization of the problem of information overload
as an economic one has become more popular. Business strategists such as Thomas H. Davenport
or Michael H. Goldhaber have adopted the term "attention economy" .
Some writers have even speculated that "attention transactions" will replace financial transactions as the focus of our economic system (Goldhaber 1997, Franck 1999). Information systems researchers have also adopted the idea, and are beginning to investigate mechanism design
s which build on the idea of creating property rights in attention (see Applications).
product costs nothing to reproduce and the problem facing the supplier of the product lies in adding valuable intangibles
that can not be reproduced at any cost. He identifies these intangibles as:
Social attention can also be associated to collective attention, i.e. how "attention to novel items propagates and eventually fades among large populations."
is a by-product of a production process that imposes burdens (or supplies benefits), to parties other than the intended consumer of a commodity. For example; air and water pollution are ‘negative’ externalities which impose burdens on society and the environment.
A market-based approach to controlling externalities was outlined in Ronald Coase
's The Problem of Social Cost . This evolved from an article on the Federal Communications Commission , in which Coase claimed that radio frequency interference is a negative externality that could be controlled by the creation of property rights.
Coase's approach to the management of externalities requires the careful specification of property rights and a set of rules for the initial allocation of the rights. Once this has been achieved, a market mechanism can theoretically manage the externality problem. The solution is not necessarily simple in its application to media content .
as "information pollution
" and applying Ronald Coase's ideas to control it.
Sending huge numbers of e-mail messages costs spammers very little, since the costs of e-mail messages are spread out over the internet service provider
s that distribute them (and the recipients who must spend attention dealing with them). Thus sending out as much spam as possible is a rational strategy: even if only 0.001% of recipients (1 in 100,000) is converted into a sale, a spam campaign can be profitable . Spammers are demanding valuable attention from potential customers, but they are avoiding paying a fair price for this attention due to the current architecture of e-mail systems.
One way this might be implemented is by charging senders a small fee per e-mail sent, often referred to as a "Sender Bond
." It might be close to free for an advertiser to send a single e-mail message to a single recipient, but sending that same e-mail to 1000 recipients would cost him 1000 times as much. A 2002 experiment with this kind of usage-based e-mail pricing found that it caused senders to spend more effort targeting their messages
to recipients who would find them relevant, thus shifting the cost of deciding whether a given e-mail message is relevant from the recipient to the sender .
Closely related is the idea of selling "interrupt rights," or small fees for the right to demand one's attention . The cost of these rights could vary according to the interruptee: interrupt rights for the CEO of a Fortune 500 company would presumably be extraordinarily expensive, while those of a high school student might be lower. Costs could also vary for an individual depending on context, perhaps rising during the busy holiday season and falling during the dog days of summer. Interruptees could decline to collect their fees from friends, family, and other welcome interrupters.
Another idea in this vein is the creation of "attention bonds," small warranties that some information will not be a waste of the recipient's time, placed into escrow
at the time of sending . Like the granters of interrupt rights, receivers could cash in their bonds to signal to the sender that a given communication was a waste of their time or elect not to cash them in to signal that more communication would be welcome.
Supporters of attention markets for controlling spam claim that their solutions are superior to the alternatives for managing uses of information systems on which there is no consensus on the question of whether it is pollution or not. For example, the use of e-mail or text messages for rallying political support or by non-profit charitable organizations may be considered spam by some users but legitimate use by others. Laws against spam put the power to make this decision in the hands of government, while technological solutions like filtering technologies put it in the hands of private companies or technologically savvy users. A market-based solution, on the other hand, allows the possibility of individual negotiation over the worth of a given message rather than a unilateral decision by a controlling party . Such negotiation itself consumes attention and carries with it an attention cost, though.
s have become the primary means for finding and accessing information on the web, high rankings in the results for certain queries have become valuable commodities, due to the ability of search engines to focus searchers' attention. Like other information systems, web search is vulnerable to pollution: "Because the Web environment contains profit seeking ventures, attention getting strategies evolve in response to search engine algorithms" . It is estimated that successful exploitation of such strategies, known as web spam, is a potential $4.5 billion per year business .
Since most major search engines now rely on some form of PageRank
(recursive counting of hyperlink
s to a site) to determine search result rankings, a gray market in the creation and trading of hyperlinks has emerged. Participants in this market engage in a variety of practices known as link spamming, link farm
ing, and reciprocal linking.
The economic incentives are similar to those of e-mail spam
: it costs very little to spammers to create huge numbers of links, so even a very small conversion rate (percentage of searchers who click on a spam-boosted search result) can be profitable. The costs of web spam are distributed among the search engines, which must spend tremendous amounts of money and labor on developing spam-detecting technologies, and searchers, who must spend attention on determining which search results are valid and which are spam (since the search engines are never 100% successful in keeping spam out of their indexes).
An attempt to change the economics of one kind of web spam is the "nofollow
" attribute for hyperlinks, which causes search engines to ignore those links for the purposes of ranking results. The hope is that webmasters and makers of web discussion software will implement systems that automatically add the "nofollow" attribute to all hyperlinks not under a site owner's direct control. The effect would be to increase the cost of creating spam links, since spammers would only be able to create links on sites they controlled.
However, as opponents of the "nofollow" attribute point out, while this solution may make it incrementally easier for search engines to detect link spam, it does not appreciably change the incentive structure for link spammers unless 100% of existing systems are upgraded to support the standard: as long as some critical mass of spammable sites exists, link spam will continue. Furthermore, the "nofollow" attribute does nothing to combat link farming or reciprocal linking. There is also a philosophical question of whether the links of site commentators (as opposed to site owners) should be treated as "second-class," leading to the claim that the attribute "heists commentators' earned attention" (NoNoFollow.net 2005).
Another issue, similar to the issue discussed above of whether or not to consider political e-mail campaigns as spam, is what to do about politically motivated link campaigns or Google bomb
s . Currently the major search engines do not treat these as web spam, but this is a decision made unilaterally by private companies. There is no opportunity for negotiation over the question of what is an appropriate use of attention expressed through hyperlinking. It remains to be seen whether a market-based approach might provide more flexible handling of these gray areas.
, in which advertisers bid on the rights to have their hyperlinks listed in the results for a given search query. The auction winner then pays the search engine the agreed price per user that follows their hyperlink. With the advent of paid inclusion, profit-seeking web sites could choose to legitimately pay for the attention of searchers, rather than attempting to subvert search algorithms.
The paid inclusion model, as well as more pervasive advertising networks like Yahoo! Publisher Network and Google's Adsense
, work by treating consumer attention as the property of the search engine (in the case of paid inclusion) or the publisher (in the case of advertising networks). This is somewhat different from the anti-spam uses of property rights in attention, which treat an individual's attention as his or her own property.
Information
Information in its most restricted technical sense is a message or collection of messages that consists of an ordered sequence of symbols, or it is the meaning that can be interpreted from such a message or collection of messages. Information can be recorded or transmitted. It can be recorded as...
that treats human attention
Attention
Attention is the cognitive process of paying attention to one aspect of the environment while ignoring others. Attention is one of the most intensely studied topics within psychology and cognitive neuroscience....
as a scarce commodity
Commodity
In economics, a commodity is the generic term for any marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs. Economic commodities comprise goods and services....
, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems.
In this perspective Thomas H. Davenport
Thomas H. Davenport
Thomas H. Davenport is an American academic and author specializing in business process innovation and knowledge management...
and J. C. Beck define the concept of attention
Attention
Attention is the cognitive process of paying attention to one aspect of the environment while ignoring others. Attention is one of the most intensely studied topics within psychology and cognitive neuroscience....
as:
Attention is focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act.
As content has grown increasingly abundant and immediately available, attention becomes the limiting factor
Limiting factor
A limiting factor or limiting resource is a factor that controls a process, such as organism growth or species population, size, or distribution. The availability of food, predation pressure, or availability of shelter are examples of factors that could be limiting for an organism...
in the consumption of information. Attention economics applies insights from other areas of economic theory to enable content consumers, producers, and intermediaries to better mediate and manage the flow of information in light of the scarcity of consumer attention.
A number of software and web-applications either explicitly or implicitly take attention economy into consideration in their design, based on the realization that if it takes the user too long to locate something, they will find it through another application. This is done, for instance, by creating filters to make sure the first content a viewer sees is relevant, of interest, or with the approval of demographics.
History
Herbert SimonHerbert Simon
Herbert Alexander Simon was an American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist, and professor—most notably at Carnegie Mellon University—whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, computer science, public administration, economics,...
was perhaps the first person to articulate the concept of attention economics when he wrote:
"...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it" .
He noted that many designers of information systems incorrectly represented their design problem as information scarcity rather than attention scarcity, and as a result they built systems that excelled at providing more and more information to people, when what was really needed were systems that excelled at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information .
In recent years, Simon's characterization of the problem of information overload
Information overload
"Information overload" is a term popularized by Alvin Toffler in his bestselling 1970 book Future Shock. It refers to the difficulty a person can have understanding an issue and making decisions that can be caused by the presence of too much information...
as an economic one has become more popular. Business strategists such as Thomas H. Davenport
Thomas H. Davenport
Thomas H. Davenport is an American academic and author specializing in business process innovation and knowledge management...
or Michael H. Goldhaber have adopted the term "attention economy" .
Some writers have even speculated that "attention transactions" will replace financial transactions as the focus of our economic system (Goldhaber 1997, Franck 1999). Information systems researchers have also adopted the idea, and are beginning to investigate mechanism design
Mechanism design
Mechanism design is a field in game theory studying solution concepts for a class of private information games...
s which build on the idea of creating property rights in attention (see Applications).
Relationship with advertising
"Attention economics" today is primarily concerned with the problem of getting consumers to consume advertising. Traditional media advertisers followed a model that suggested consumers went through a linear process they called AIDA - Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. Attention is therefore a major and the first stage in the process of converting non-consumers. Since the cost to transmit advertising to consumers is now sufficiently low that more ads can be transmitted to a consumer than the consumer can process, the consumer's attention becomes the scarce resource to be allocated.Intangibles
According to digital culture expert Kevin Kelly, the modern attention economy is increasingly one where the consumerConsumer
Consumer is a broad label for any individuals or households that use goods generated within the economy. The concept of a consumer occurs in different contexts, so that the usage and significance of the term may vary.-Economics and marketing:...
product costs nothing to reproduce and the problem facing the supplier of the product lies in adding valuable intangibles
Intangibles
The term intangibles is most commonly used to describe things that are recognized but not easily quantified; a common example are economic intangibles which describes something not easily quantified within a given theory of economics...
that can not be reproduced at any cost. He identifies these intangibles as:
- Immediacy - priority access, immediate delivery
- Personalization - tailored just for you
- Interpretation - support and guidance
- Authenticity - how can you be sure it is the real thing?
- Accessibility - wherever, whenever
- Embodiment - books, live music
- Patronage - "paying simply because it feels good",
- Findability - "When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention — and most of it free — being found is valuable."
Social attention, collective attention
Attention economy is also relevant to the social sphere. More specifically, long term attention can also be considered according to the attention that a person dedicates managing its interactions with others. Dedicating too much attention to these interactions can lead to "social interaction overload", i.e. when people are overwhelmed in managing their relationships with others, for instance in the context of social network services in which people are the subject of a high level of social solicitations.Social attention can also be associated to collective attention, i.e. how "attention to novel items propagates and eventually fades among large populations."
Controlling information pollution
One application treats various forms of information (spam, advertising) as a form of pollution or 'detrimental externality'. In economics an externalityExternality
In economics, an externality is a cost or benefit, not transmitted through prices, incurred by a party who did not agree to the action causing the cost or benefit...
is a by-product of a production process that imposes burdens (or supplies benefits), to parties other than the intended consumer of a commodity. For example; air and water pollution are ‘negative’ externalities which impose burdens on society and the environment.
A market-based approach to controlling externalities was outlined in Ronald Coase
Ronald Coase
Ronald Harry Coase is a British-born, American-based economist and the Clifton R. Musser Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Chicago Law School. After studying with the University of London External Programme in 1927–29, Coase entered the London School of Economics, where he took...
's The Problem of Social Cost . This evolved from an article on the Federal Communications Commission , in which Coase claimed that radio frequency interference is a negative externality that could be controlled by the creation of property rights.
Coase's approach to the management of externalities requires the careful specification of property rights and a set of rules for the initial allocation of the rights. Once this has been achieved, a market mechanism can theoretically manage the externality problem. The solution is not necessarily simple in its application to media content .
E-mail spam
Several researchers have proposed treating spamE-mail spam
Email spam, also known as junk email or unsolicited bulk email , is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by email. Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk. One subset of UBE is UCE...
as "information pollution
Information pollution
Information pollution is the contamination of information supply with irrelevant, redundant, unsolicited and low-value information. The spread of useless and undesirable information can have a detrimental effect on human activities...
" and applying Ronald Coase's ideas to control it.
Sending huge numbers of e-mail messages costs spammers very little, since the costs of e-mail messages are spread out over the internet service provider
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
s that distribute them (and the recipients who must spend attention dealing with them). Thus sending out as much spam as possible is a rational strategy: even if only 0.001% of recipients (1 in 100,000) is converted into a sale, a spam campaign can be profitable . Spammers are demanding valuable attention from potential customers, but they are avoiding paying a fair price for this attention due to the current architecture of e-mail systems.
One way this might be implemented is by charging senders a small fee per e-mail sent, often referred to as a "Sender Bond
Certified e-mail
Certified email is an email whitelisting technique by which an internet service provider allows someone to bypass spam filters when sending email messages to its subscribers, in return for paying a fee to the certifying service. A sender can then be sure that his messages have reached their...
." It might be close to free for an advertiser to send a single e-mail message to a single recipient, but sending that same e-mail to 1000 recipients would cost him 1000 times as much. A 2002 experiment with this kind of usage-based e-mail pricing found that it caused senders to spend more effort targeting their messages
Digital marketing
Digital Marketing is the promoting of brands using all forms of digital advertising channels to reach consumers. Digital marketing extends beyond Internet Marketing to include channels that do not require the use of the Internet...
to recipients who would find them relevant, thus shifting the cost of deciding whether a given e-mail message is relevant from the recipient to the sender .
Closely related is the idea of selling "interrupt rights," or small fees for the right to demand one's attention . The cost of these rights could vary according to the interruptee: interrupt rights for the CEO of a Fortune 500 company would presumably be extraordinarily expensive, while those of a high school student might be lower. Costs could also vary for an individual depending on context, perhaps rising during the busy holiday season and falling during the dog days of summer. Interruptees could decline to collect their fees from friends, family, and other welcome interrupters.
Another idea in this vein is the creation of "attention bonds," small warranties that some information will not be a waste of the recipient's time, placed into escrow
Escrow
An escrow is:* an arrangement made under contractual provisions between transacting parties, whereby an independent trusted third party receives and disburses money and/or documents for the transacting parties, with the timing of such disbursement by the third party dependent on the fulfillment of...
at the time of sending . Like the granters of interrupt rights, receivers could cash in their bonds to signal to the sender that a given communication was a waste of their time or elect not to cash them in to signal that more communication would be welcome.
Supporters of attention markets for controlling spam claim that their solutions are superior to the alternatives for managing uses of information systems on which there is no consensus on the question of whether it is pollution or not. For example, the use of e-mail or text messages for rallying political support or by non-profit charitable organizations may be considered spam by some users but legitimate use by others. Laws against spam put the power to make this decision in the hands of government, while technological solutions like filtering technologies put it in the hands of private companies or technologically savvy users. A market-based solution, on the other hand, allows the possibility of individual negotiation over the worth of a given message rather than a unilateral decision by a controlling party . Such negotiation itself consumes attention and carries with it an attention cost, though.
Web spam
As search engineSearch engine
A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...
s have become the primary means for finding and accessing information on the web, high rankings in the results for certain queries have become valuable commodities, due to the ability of search engines to focus searchers' attention. Like other information systems, web search is vulnerable to pollution: "Because the Web environment contains profit seeking ventures, attention getting strategies evolve in response to search engine algorithms" . It is estimated that successful exploitation of such strategies, known as web spam, is a potential $4.5 billion per year business .
Since most major search engines now rely on some form of PageRank
PageRank
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page and used by the Google Internet search engine, that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set...
(recursive counting of hyperlink
Hyperlink
In computing, a hyperlink is a reference to data that the reader can directly follow, or that is followed automatically. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks...
s to a site) to determine search result rankings, a gray market in the creation and trading of hyperlinks has emerged. Participants in this market engage in a variety of practices known as link spamming, link farm
Link farm
On the World Wide Web, a link farm is any group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other site in the group. Although some link farms can be created by hand, most are created through automated programs and services. A link farm is a form of spamming the index of a search engine...
ing, and reciprocal linking.
The economic incentives are similar to those of e-mail spam
E-mail spam
Email spam, also known as junk email or unsolicited bulk email , is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by email. Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk. One subset of UBE is UCE...
: it costs very little to spammers to create huge numbers of links, so even a very small conversion rate (percentage of searchers who click on a spam-boosted search result) can be profitable. The costs of web spam are distributed among the search engines, which must spend tremendous amounts of money and labor on developing spam-detecting technologies, and searchers, who must spend attention on determining which search results are valid and which are spam (since the search engines are never 100% successful in keeping spam out of their indexes).
An attempt to change the economics of one kind of web spam is the "nofollow
Nofollow
nofollow is a value that can be assigned to the rel attribute of an HTML a element to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index...
" attribute for hyperlinks, which causes search engines to ignore those links for the purposes of ranking results. The hope is that webmasters and makers of web discussion software will implement systems that automatically add the "nofollow" attribute to all hyperlinks not under a site owner's direct control. The effect would be to increase the cost of creating spam links, since spammers would only be able to create links on sites they controlled.
However, as opponents of the "nofollow" attribute point out, while this solution may make it incrementally easier for search engines to detect link spam, it does not appreciably change the incentive structure for link spammers unless 100% of existing systems are upgraded to support the standard: as long as some critical mass of spammable sites exists, link spam will continue. Furthermore, the "nofollow" attribute does nothing to combat link farming or reciprocal linking. There is also a philosophical question of whether the links of site commentators (as opposed to site owners) should be treated as "second-class," leading to the claim that the attribute "heists commentators' earned attention" (NoNoFollow.net 2005).
Another issue, similar to the issue discussed above of whether or not to consider political e-mail campaigns as spam, is what to do about politically motivated link campaigns or Google bomb
Google bomb
The terms Google bomb and Googlewashing refer to practices, such as creating large numbers of links, that cause a web page to have a high ranking for searches on unrelated or off topic keyword phrases, often for comical or satirical purposes...
s . Currently the major search engines do not treat these as web spam, but this is a decision made unilaterally by private companies. There is no opportunity for negotiation over the question of what is an appropriate use of attention expressed through hyperlinking. It remains to be seen whether a market-based approach might provide more flexible handling of these gray areas.
Sales lead generation
The realization that the attention focused by search engines was a valuable commodity led to the creation of the paid inclusion model, in which search engines charge advertisers to have hyperlinks to their sites included in search results. The dominant form of paid inclusion is Pay for placementPay for placement
Pay for placement, or P4P, is an Internet advertising model in which advertisements appear along with relevant search results from a Web search engine. Under this model, advertisers bid for the right to present an advertisement with specific search terms in an open auction...
, in which advertisers bid on the rights to have their hyperlinks listed in the results for a given search query. The auction winner then pays the search engine the agreed price per user that follows their hyperlink. With the advent of paid inclusion, profit-seeking web sites could choose to legitimately pay for the attention of searchers, rather than attempting to subvert search algorithms.
The paid inclusion model, as well as more pervasive advertising networks like Yahoo! Publisher Network and Google's Adsense
AdSense
Google AdSense which is a program run by Google Inc. allows publishers in the Google Network of content sites to automatically serve text, image, video, and rich media adverts that are targeted to site content and audience. These adverts are administered, sorted, and maintained by Google, and they...
, work by treating consumer attention as the property of the search engine (in the case of paid inclusion) or the publisher (in the case of advertising networks). This is somewhat different from the anti-spam uses of property rights in attention, which treat an individual's attention as his or her own property.
See also
- AttentionAttentionAttention is the cognitive process of paying attention to one aspect of the environment while ignoring others. Attention is one of the most intensely studied topics within psychology and cognitive neuroscience....
- Attention managementAttention managementAttention management refers to models and tools for supporting the management of attention at the individual or at the collective level , and at the short-term or at a longer term ....
- Attention (disambiguation)Attention (disambiguation)Attention is the mental process involved in attending to other objects.Attention may also refer to:-In psychology and neuroscience:* Attention seeking, behavior which is intended to attract attention from others...
- Information overloadInformation overload"Information overload" is a term popularized by Alvin Toffler in his bestselling 1970 book Future Shock. It refers to the difficulty a person can have understanding an issue and making decisions that can be caused by the presence of too much information...
- Post scarcityPost scarcityPost scarcity is a hypothetical form of economy or society, in which things such as goods, services and information are free, or practically free...