The Attention Economy (2024)

Always exciting putting together something good for the Digging Deep community. This week I chose to focus on a topic that is not talked about enough. The Attention Economy. The digital renaissance has shortened people’s attention spans greatly. Attention is now looked at as a resource and I am here to go in to detail as to why that is . . . Let’s get into it.

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With abundance and convenience comes impatience. If you want an answer to something, but a website is taking too long, no worries, our impatient asses will wonder on over to a website that will give it to us quicker. Attention is a finite resource in today’s day in age. We only have so much to give. There is so much information out there and so little time to find it. As a result, a lot of these websites and social media platforms utilize algorithms to facilitate what you need to the top of your feed. It is not a mystery as to why big companies use these techniques to grab your attention. First of all, they make money on your clicks. And, they are pulling away business from potential competitors. This is obvious. However, there are two other elements to the attention economy that are talked about less. Those being, leveraging attention as a content creator, and the nasty effects that the attention economy has on our society and mental health. As a creator or founder of a company, you want all eyes on you and your product. This makes sense. There is something natural enough about it where by capturing attention, you are able to convey something valuable or form a relationship with you(or product) and the user(or follower). What is much less natural and detrimental to people’s well-being is algorithm’s like Tik Tok. It has a solid track record of making people’s attention span so short that they can’t focus on anything. Another sector that attention is extremely important is the Web 3 space. Many projects fail and succeed on attention alone. With that being said, let’s first look at capturing attention as a creator/business/founder.

Leveraging Attention as a Creator/Business/Founder

At it’s core, the attention economy has given business’s and creators new opportunities to make money and share value. There are many that do it well, but three that I want to talk about. 1 creator. 1 business. 1 NFT project founder.

Mr. Beast

First, the king of content creation, Mr. Beast. I have listened to Mr. Beast on the Joe Rogan Experience and the Lex Fridman podcast, as well as watch a ton of his videos. If there is one thing we can say for sure, it is that he knows how to capture someone’s attention. The funny thing is, his tactics are pretty straight-forward. Something he mentions a lot is putting himself in the audience’s shoes. Thinking to himself, “if I was a viewer, why would I want to stay on this video?” Well, it starts with grabbing the viewer’s attention. For Youtube this means a simple and effective title, alongside a masterful thumbnail. If you fail at this step, your video is already destined for failure. Next, a punchy hook. If you don’t have the viewer intrigued in the first few seconds, they are going to watch something else. That is why Mr. Beast says he spends so much time drawing up something captivating. This is directly correlated to keeping their attention for the rest of the video. So much money is invested back into his video’s simply because it needs to be interesting every single second to get a higher averaged time watched. Lastly, Beast is ambitious but executes. He is planning BIG. So big that there is second-thought as to whether it is even possible. Everybody wants to watch something that might be impossible.

Athletic Greens

You may have heard of this company, and it is because they are everywhere. Athletic Greens is basically just another high-quality greens mix that people drink to get their vitamins and nutrients. What they do differently than every other greens company, and other companies in general, is get eyes on their product. They know exactly where their potential customers are roaming. Therefore, they sponsor the podcasts and shows of Joe Rogan, Matt Jones, Lex Fridman, Andrew Schultz, Andrew Huberman, and more. They have conquered this entire creator ecosystem and everyone buys it because they want to hear their favorite podcaster tell them to drink it. If I told you to drink AG you would tell me to get lost, but if Joe Rogan says they make him feel good and recommends you drink them, well then you are taking out that credit card. Not to mention, they give out a year of free vitamin D and 5 travel packs with your first purchase. There it is, the thing that gets everyone’s attention. Free sh*t.

Frank DeGods

If you are coming from Web 3, you probably know why I am using Frank as an example. He is dialed in. His project DeGods had a slow start. It was a lot of trial and error. The best thing he did to put eyes on the project was put himself in the limelight as a leader. It was really ever since this famous tweet that he captured attention.

You can bet that people like to watch someone try new things. Frank is known for building in public, trying to pioneer NBD things in Web 3. It is set up so that people are going to follow either way to see if what he is doing is working or not. In addition, he is good at pivoting in a new direction when sh*t hits the fan. I would imagine his thoughts go something like this, “Well that didn’t work, but didn’t work isn’t good enough. Let’s try something bigger and BETTER.” It is a winning formula. With his other collection y00ts, and original collection DeGods, bridging to other blockchains, there will be attention from completely new communities. Now Polygon, Ethereum, and Solana communities are watching. A true attention magnet.

The Unintended Effects of the Attention Economy

Technological Progress has gone in one direction since technology was thing. That direction was not down. Everything we do or use is digital. In retrospect, considering technology makes life easier and more efficient, there is a good reason we are in this place. What nobody accounted for is the consequences. You can see it in the Tik Tok algorithm alone. That algorithm is too good. People of all ages waste so much damn time scrolling through their Tik Tok feed for hours because of how direct it is to your interests. Every thumb swipe is a 10 second dopamine hit of something you will like. When you go back out into the real world, that attention span gets lost in translation. You are crazy to think that someone who has scrolled Tik Tok all day will have the attention span or patience to wait in a line or for their food in a restaurant. On the topic, restaurants know how short people’s attention spans have gotten. For that reason, most have put a bar code on the table so that you don’t have to wait all of 3 minutes for the waiter to bring out the f*cking menu. This is even more devastating to kids. Kids have a pretty short attention span as it is. Having a tablet while out to eat keeps them busy, but eliminates their ability to hold attention during a conversation. No conversation will ever be as interesting as that Tik Tok video. People don’t even have the attention span to sit with their own boredom hence why they can’t get out of their own way. Boredom clears the mind and allows thoughts to freely flow to and from the mind, but when your attention is always taken, there is no way for this to happen. It is a really slippery slope. I don’t think we have any idea what the repercussions of this really are. Rates of mental illness are sky high and I think this is an obvious factor. The technological advancements we have made are amazing, but their attention draws people away from what life is really about.

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