Where does the attention economy end?

Question

I can see how one's attention is valuable but hits a point of diminishing returns. At the extreme, one's attention is not valuable if that person spends his or her entire day consuming apps and not creating value (or working). His or her ad revenue will be worth less than someone with a job, if it is worth anything at all. This person will also use a lot of the organization's resources and have a high amount of "engagement" with the application.This makes Facebook's shift to young adults [1] seem more clear - that group can spend as much time as they want on Facebook and consumption, and they can then spend their parents' income. It's a constant fresh source of income with buying power.I roughly equate attention to time and energy - once it is spent, it is gone. On the whole, as billions of people spend their time and energy scrolling through ad-supported applications, their attention becomes less valuable over time. Do you think that the time and energy spent on ad-supported applications is pulling from users' productivity? Or just transferring it from other forms of recreation?I don't quite think I'm hitting the mark here, but I'd like to know your thoughts on if the attention economy is sustainable in its current state. Have we hit peak "attention" and the only new users left are kids in middle school and high school? I think this would make for interesting discussion with recent headlines and revelations about the major companies in the space [2].[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/25/22745622/facebook-young-adults-refocusing-teams[2] Impact from Apple on SNAP, Facebook revelations, HN headlines recently involving Google... it goes on.

AnimalMuppet · Accepted Answer

Well, the attention economy can't grow much further. People only have 24 hours in a day, and some of it they spend sleeping. Sure, the rest of the time they're paying attention to something. But the amount of it that can be captured by the "attention economy" that hasn't already been captured is kind of limited. In the US, for example, can the attention economy double from here? I kind of doubt it. Those who are participating aren't going to give it twice as much time, and those who aren't, aren't going to suddenly start in large numbers.Globally, the attention economy might increase more as more people come online, but that's a finite limit, too.So we may not be at "peak attention economy", but we're not too far from it, in my view.

version_five · Answer

I don't want to give anyone ideas, but there is still driving, sports / exercise, eating out (although many people probably spend their dates glued to the phone now), going to shows... probably lots of others I'm not thinking of. I think there's going to be a long tail of seeing what attention can be squeezed out of these and other currently "wasted" activities

lm28469 · Answer

> His or her ad revenue will be worth less than someone with a job, if it is worth anything at all.
The ad industry is (mostly) a gigantic scam, it doesn't matter who sees or what interactions people have with ads, megacorps will still pay for them and will get their monthly "user engagement" report full of buzzwords and biased data.
Anyone working in this industry knows it

Gtex555 · Answer

Advertising is like pay to play, while ads don't work all that well for the most part if everyone stopped paying for them save for one person, they'd be the only thing we`d ever see. So basically people pay for ads to stop anyone else from having a monopoly , that's why you see YouTube had those ExpressVPN and SquareSpace ads en masse, you inject a lot of money for one year on a single platform and have a mini monopoly(only way for ads to work).
What bearing does this have on the attention economy ? Well its like anything with perfect competition , gotta keep playing despite diminishing returns otherwise someone will have a monopoly on the market if you stop.
Hence why Lord Theil said competition is for losers!