The attention economy is a myth
Your attention is being undervalued by at least $5.4 trillion. It's time to expose a central deception of the modern internet.
This is a follow-up to our last post, You will spend as much time with media in your life as studying for 35 college degrees. In this post we’ll dig into the economic value.
“We will keep asking the question: when you pay attention to an article, or a podcast, or a video - is that learning value, or advertising value? Which matters more to you? And which value is more valuable, in a knowledge economy?”
- The Readocracy Manifesto
The Status Quo
There is a central myth that has dominated the internet and, as a result, our modern society. The myth is as follows:
The best and only way to effectively monetize media offerings and related platforms or apps is through advertising and data harvesting.
This is the basis of the modern attention economy. It has resulted in one of the most broadly and openly adversarial business models in human history. It has become almost cliché common knowledge: “you aren’t using a product; you are the product.”
Modern media platforms are designed to maximize our engagement, and in this way create an infinite treadmill of advertising opportunities, extracting as much data about our preferences in the process as possible to perfect those advertising opportunities.
So to recap the key realities of the current model:
The content and experience don’t matter. The main value of content is what you look at around that content. In other words the content itself is not the point as much as its ability to facilitate you looking at advertisements or branded statements around or within it. This means that investing in high quality content that generates less engagement is inferior to producing low quality content that drives high engagement. Similarly, investing in a high quality user experience that makes users more thoughtful and less divided, but in the process lowers engagement volume, is also not good. The quality of the content and the quality of the experience are fundamentally secondary. This is the crux of Cory Doctorow’s now popular term enshittification.
The data produced by you, about you, is not for you. It is not provided to you in any way, it is extracted away from you for use by others, who can use it against you to manipulate your future actions through future content and ads.
Related to the above, the value of your attention is never intrinsic, it is extrinsic: when you pay attention to something, it isn’t measured in the context of the value it has for you, it’s measured in the value it has to somebody else in their ability to reach you.
This should all sound awful by most standards, to most people. Yet it has been accepted with a resigned collective shoulder shrug, as if to say “it’s the only way we know how to make it work”. This attitude is exemplified by the industry response to ad-blocking and the blocking of data trackers: there is always an outcry, contrary to the satisfaction of most users, that advertising and tracking are how content and platforms are fundamentally monetized, and without these specific aspects they would no longer be viable. The modern internet will cease to function.
If that seems impossible to believe, or absurd when laid out like this, it’s because it is. As we’ve written before, “this approach to valuing attention is an unspoken lie we’ve slowly swallowed like snake oil over the course of 20 years. Ask yourself: is it that Facebook and Google fit the internet - or, rather, that the modern internet is made in their image?”
There is another way.
Unpacking the myth
To get to the numbers we need to put things in perspective.
There are two revealing questions you can use to do so:
1) Is media, including internet-based media, first and foremost an information medium, or an entertainment medium?
The answer should be obvious. Whether it be the printing press, or the modern internet, both were first and foremost created for the purpose of disseminating valuable information. It is true that the most compelling information is also entertaining (and the best entertainment is informative), but the horse comes before the cart.
The explosion of TikTok and the TikTok-ification of other platforms is not a reflection of the medium’s core value as much as of its core business model.
When we use the internet, or go to the library, we can split our time between purpose-oriented media, and just-for-fun media AKA distraction. Even for the most casual person, a significant portion, and certainly the most valuable part, is around the former, not the latter.
So then how is it that we have created a monetization scheme that completely neglects the formal value of the information, and only measures and leverages the distraction component? By framing value in the way that we have, every type of content, whether informational or not, has been force-fit through a distraction filter. The evisceration of quality journalism, the oft-lamented race-to-the-bottom of media, provides ample evidence of this.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The majority of the value is being left unvalued.
2) The data currently harvested through your online behaviour reflects your interests, passions, likely knowledge, and influence on others. Does this seem only valuable for advertising targeting?
The simple reality is that our world runs on who you know, what people think you know, and the power people think you have. Our entire society is built around these truths, and educational and professional opportunities both flow downstream from them.
How could it be that for the first time in human history we can almost continuously measure the majority of somebody’s relationship with various subjects, and with others — yet distort and narrow the usefulness of this data, and its value, as only being for advertising?
While media and entertainment might define our culture, and therefore give the attention economy significant power, our world, our economy, and our society are underpinned by a socially-driven knowledge economy: knowledge, perception of knowledge, subject matter influence.
In that context your data takes on dramatic new value.
Digging into the numbers: mapping attention onto knowledge, status, health, national security, and more
Let’s cut to the chase: the digital advertising market is worth as much as $740B. Nothing to sneeze at — assuming we disregard the rampant fraud and over-valuing that’s been estimated to be as high as 88%, and only as “low” as 22%. Reminder: according to the World Federation of Advertisers itself, ad fraud is arguably the second largest organized crime enterprise behind only the drug trade.
But, lets just ignore all that and generously assume the market value is a legitimate near-$800B. Even so, this value pales in comparison to the value of our attention when we reframe it in an education context.
As mentioned in our previous article, the average person will spend as much time with media as they would studying for 35 college degrees conservatively, and as much 104 college degrees more realistically. Given most would agree that a significant chunk of our time with content is spent consuming, contributing around, and discussing subjects that we are passionate about, and/or are educational directly or indirectly, let’s map this data in some new directions:
The Higher Education market — where people are augmenting prescribed materials heavily with their own informal consumption, and educators are increasingly augmenting or even replacing textbooks with online content — is worth $740B.
Corporate Learning — the industry that preoccupies itself with all the learning you do for work, which studies show people do through self-directed content consumption — is another $340B.
Professional Associations — those responsible for recognizing and encouraging hundreds of millions of professionals’ continuing learning, often through myriad content sources — is another $84B.
Corporate events — an under-the-radar Goliath of a market where people of all professions gather to attend sessions and ostensibly learn with sparse evidence for their time spent, including around sessions recordings — is a full $500B.
The media industry as a whole — including journalism, which has been forced to bend the knee to the advertising-driven model, unable to justify the value of more deeply researched content, and where B2B industry specific content is booming in value — is almost $1.6 trillion.
Approximately 12% of revenue from knowledge-driven organizations (using the “service consulting” industry as benchmark) is spent on marketing, where that marketing is almost entirely around promoting the expertise of their people, which is currently done in outdated, inefficient, non-scalable ways (webinars, twitter accounts, white papers).
This all in the context of a world where:
There are almost 820M high school and higher education students, and 1.2B knowledge workers, who are spending over $1 trillion every year (Higher Ed. students spending globally, on average, around $1K per year during their studies, and continuing education up to $8K per program) trying to formally prove their knowledge, and desperately posturing on Linkedin, Twitter/X, and elsewhere to try to signal their subject affiliations, yet unable to make any of those 35-104 degrees worth of time count.
In the S&P500, 84% of the market value isn’t tangible assets (devices, real estate, etc.); it’s intangible assets, specifically I.P. and reputation. What do people think of your expertise and your people? $21 trillion. How valuable would it be to more continuously, effectively, and impressively measure and showcase this?
But wait, there’s more. What about the impact of our attention to media on our health, at work and in society? Or on our nations and their healthy functioning?
What happens when your employees are exposed to the firehouse of agitation-optimized media with no assistance? Approximately 12 billion workdays are lost to depression and anxiety, translating into an estimated $1 trillion loss in productivity. Think of what this means for workplace benefits and insurance, if you could measurably drive that cost down.
What is the cost when the average person is completely jacked up on anxiety by a system that is trained to elevate it? The global annual direct cost of anxiety disorders has been estimated to be up to $6.5 trillion, or 2.08% of all healthcare-related costs. That’s $135B.
The National Security industry is obsessed with resolving the fragmentation and weaponization of our information commons. Anything that brings coherence back, and sanity to our society, is of interest for their reliably sizeable budgets.
All of that… and we think our attention, our passions, and the data are best served, and only valuable, through an advertising lens?
All in a world where the quantified self around learning and health is exploding: there are 350M users of fitness trackers, a number growing at 300% annually, Strava hit $265M ARR in 2023 with 100 million users, and Duolingo and its streak-based learning is at 100M users growing at 59%.
To put it bluntly: using our attention for advertising is the dumbest, most destructive, most narrowminded way to monetize the internet and our media environment. The reality is clear. It’s time to act on it.
Building a new reality is everyone’s job
With Readocracy we have been frequently approached and propositioned by AdTech executives and investors who think our technology would be better suited in that direction. Often our users or neutral investors assume we must go in this direction as well. The above is always the foundation of our response:
It’s unethical and counter to our mission.
It’s bad business to align with an industry that is so volatile, rife with fraud, and under enormous regulatory pressure.
Most importantly, it’s bad business, as we’ve outlined here. There is more money to be made by mapping to the knowledge economy.
We are proud to be pioneers, with new technology that makes this possible, but there is no reason we should be alone.
Society needs a healthier information commons to have any chance of surviving the present and future — and the economics of a better way are sitting here waiting to be explored.
We hope more will join us.
If you found this post informative, subscribe to keep up as we explore more of the thinking behind our platform, exploring the intersection of the attention and knowledge economies.
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