Attention is money. In today’s online age, Companies will do anything for a user’s attention. This competition for people’s valable attention has become so important that a new term has been coined to describe it – the “attention economy.”
In general if there’s attention, money will follow. This has always been true – if a business has a large amount of attention from potential customers, they will have many more opportunities to make a large profit in comparison to a business which is lacking in attention from the people. As such, more attention is a direct benefit for any business. Today’s major companies have taken note of this and have greatly increased their attempts on getting people’s attention to the best of their abilities.
Today, the largest market for attention is found on the internet – specifically on social media sites such as Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Every time a user goes onto one of these sites, he or she has a goal in mind on what he or she wants to get out of their visit. Although it seems like finding the seeked information would be a very straightforward process, the second the user clicks on a link they are immediately tracked in dozens of ways for the sake of getting information on how to get the user’s attention in the future. For example, if a YouTube user clicks on a cooking tutorial video, YouTube will automatically track various statistics such as the user’s general watch time on the video, the amount of times the user paused, and where the user clicked ahead to see if the user left a positive interaction on the video. If the interaction is deemed to be positive, YouTube will add similar types of videos into the user’s feed to keep the user coming back for more of the content they enjoy, all while taking money from advertisements that are being shown to the user every time they visit the site.
This type of tracking is not only limited to YouTube. In fact, it is a strategic disadvantage to not have a large amount of tracking because if a service cannot attract the attention of the user in the future, they are losing many potential customers and in turn losing many potential future profits. In conclusion, this high importance of user’s attention during this online age gave rise to a new, extremely profitable economy.
Source: https://econreview.berkeley.edu/paying-attention-the-attention-economy/#:~:text=Economics%20is%20the%20study%20of,housing%2C%20food%2C%20or%20money.