Your Attention Please

Attention is one of the most scarce resources we have. My children fight for my attention. My wife sometimes wonders if I’m paying attention. My work demands attention. And oh-by-the-way, marketers are trying to get my attention thousands of times per day.

I’ve been thinking about the idea of attention a lot lately as advertising and content relies on it. Advertisers buy attention with the hopes that they can convert some of that attention into one or more of the following (non-exhaustive list): purchase, loyalty, retention, consideration and awareness.

A human is born with attention: 24 hours a day of attention. While every human is born with attention, not every human is born with a wallet or the same economic means.

Let me clarify and draw insight from the above statement.

In thinking about business models for the web, advertising is the model that enables the most participants. Highly distributed content enables mass media.

Advertisers want to purchase attention for some expected outcome and everyone in the world has some level of attention to give. It’s easy to see why the web, which is made up of content, uses advertising as it’s major monetization model.

If we were to switch business models and look at things like micro-payments or subscriptions, these models are limited as not everyone around the world could afford whatever the cost is to purchase content. In addition, why purchase content if you can find it on the next site for free?

What’s interesting to me is that publishers are mediating attention on behalf of users.

ESPN is basically brokering my attention value to Coca Cola or Pepsi and keeping the revenue from that to create content that I [should] want to consume.

One of the areas that I’m thinking about is what if users brokered their own attention? Why let the publisher? Why not let the user broker and share with publishers as they view content and the web? Who has tried this and succeeded? Or failed? Lets chat.

This post is written by Darren Herman, the VP of Content Services at Mozilla. While not skiing with his family or on cross-country flights to Mountain View (CA), Herman thinks about the future of content and it’s convergence with Madison Avenue. This post is his thinking and not one that is reflective of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @dherman76.

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