The Attention Economy May Boom in Decentralized projects
Learn more about how this approach can make users and companies profit in a fair ecosystem
Have you ever thought of your attention as a valuable resource? Human beings have a limited attention span to share during their wakefulness hours. For instance, when we read a post, we may listen to music or hear someone talk in the background. At any moment, you decide how to split your concentration to these information sources.
Starting from this point, attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity. By applying economic theory to solve various information management problems that arise when handling human behavior patterns.
What is Attention?
As Matthew Crawford stated “Attention is a resource — a person has only so much of it.”
Following this approach to attention, Thomas H. Davenport and J. C. Beck define the concept of attention as:
Attention is focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act.
In other words, there is a limit of attention for everyone and the availability of this resource may vary according to different parameters (time, age, interest, etc.) On the internet, as content has grown increasingly abundant and immediately available, attention becomes the limiting factor in the consumption of information.
For instance, nobody can watch all the series of films available Netflix in one day, week, or even a year. Estimations point out you would need at least 4 years and content is uploaded continuously so it’s a never-ending challenge. And this is only one service, there is a vast number of items that can drag our attention online.
How Is Attention Measured?
Until now, advertisements have run without actually checking if the end-user is paying attention. Few systems can double-check the reception of the content while it’s been broadcasted. Think of YouTube and its endless stream of ads running before you play that video you like.
Some of them cannot be paused or skipped, others you may skip with a tap. How many of those have you recently paid attention to? In my case, I remember one funny monologue by Alec Baldwin describing a famous trading social network. That one got my attention. Why? It was fun, fresh, out the ordinary.
Moreover, I rewatched that clip as an ad quite a few times. The system behind the ad campaign, in that case, Google, “knows” that I paid some attention based on the play record. Therefore, the ad reappeared in my feed several times. But, this takeover by repetition holds also true for ads I skip without double thinking. Can they now do any better than this?
Woonkly and the Attention Economy
Our decentralized project has taken this approach one step further. There is an active role of the end-user while watching videos: the PoC hunt. The Proof of Click mechanic, a small icon that moves around the video for a limited time or until it’s clicked, allows the user to actively interact with the content.
Watching a video on Woonkly works this way:
- A user plays a video,
- PoCs appear during the broadcast,
- The user is free to catch them or not.
The PoC approach is a non-disturbing method to verify if the user is paying attention to the content. What’s more, they have a reason to catch (click) them: they get Woonks (WOONK).
At Woonkly, the attention economy approach has evolved to treat the user input as currency. Thus, they are free to cash out or reinvest the tokens they can gather while watching videos they like. Other projects have also realized that the user’s attention is valuable but we already have a working platform.
In conclusion, more decentralized projects will find value in the attention economy in the long term. Adding the blockchain advantages to the data management paradigm of this approach benefits both parties. Users can get profits, as they do with Woonkly, and so can do companies sharing their income fairly. The attention economy can improve the interaction with platforms we use and love every day.
- Check how PoCs work free at https://www.woonkly.com/.
- Exchange ETH-WOONK pair on Latoken.
Written by César Patiño, PR Manager at Woonkly.
