The Rise of the Attention Economy
Have you heard of the attention economy: a collection of businesses who commodity and profit off of peoples’ undivided attention? Here’s a clue: it’s one of the largest growing economies in the last few years–especially within tech–and most of us give it our attention hours per day.
Humble Beginnings
Benjamin H. Day introduced the attention economy to the public on September 3, 1833 in the form of a newspaper named The New York Sun. This new business model was revolutionary because prior to the Sun, New York City newspapers were way too expensive for the average person–information was (and in many ways still is) a luxury.
Day included lots of space for ads in the newspaper so most of the Sun’s profit was from ads. It was simple and effective, cutting the cost of writing and producing enough so everyone around the city can afford it. Buying a newspaper wasn’t just for rich people anymore.
Day understood that as long as he could keep as many eyes on his newspaper as possible for as many volumes (and therefore time) as possible, his customers “were in fact his product.” He could use the mass population to bid their attention for the right business that wanted to pay for it. That’s pretty much exactly how some ads work today.
Over the years, Day expanded the newspaper reach and built his audience up by supplying them with insatiable news and stories. He hired others to interview inmates in jail. Day’s employees were often found circling the courts to catch a dramatic and intense trial. The Sun Newspaper tried to find the most raunchy, outrageous, and ridiculous story on any day. I could imagine that many of these people–having just been in jail or on trail–were in a vulnerable and intense state while being interviewed.
People who are rarely seen and never heard now had a small platform to be seen and a small opportunity to supplement their income. With this tactic, the attention industry was born, constantly pursuing the “exploitation of human attention [which] is in some deeper way the exploitation of our persons.”
And advertisers have been paying top dollar for this exploitation, replicating this model for various other products, services, and content to date. One notable application is the 1990s television talk show.
The 1990s Television Talk Show
Originally inspired by Phil Donahue, American television talk shows have a specific charm and model to them, expertly crafted with a mixture of entertainment, politics, and audience participation. At the start, TV talk shows were crafted to appeal to everyone just as the New York Sun claimed at their start. Fun Fact: the New York Sun had copycat newspapers that co-opted the business model, but some transcended newspapers altogether.
In the 1990’s there were 24 different talk shows on air: Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi, Jenny Jones, Arsenio Hall, Ricki Lake, Jay Leno and Maury to name a few. With so much competition, many of the shows went to great lengths to build up their audience. The more attention the shows received, the more ads they can show, thus the more their profits rose.
In “Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads”, Tim Wu recounts the effect competition has on attention-based business models. “Under competition, the race will naturally run to the bottom; attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative, whatever stimulus may more likely engage what cognitive scientists call our ‘automatic’ attention as opposed to our ‘controlled’ attention, the kind we direct with intent. The race to a bottomless bottom, appealing to what one might call the audience’s baser instincts, poses a fundamental, continual dilemma for the attention merchant–just how far will he go to get the harvest?”
The blueprint for 90’s tv talk shows explored a range of topics, the next more outrageous than the last. From adults that acted as babies, people confronting their significant other about cheating, or even addiction interventions, no topic seemed off the table for the Jerry Springer Show.
The Jerry Springer Show
If you know anything about the Jerry Springer Show, you know that it’s synonymous with violence. Wig snatching, punching, and chair-throwing are all typical behaviors on air, having artfully curated and crafted stories that actively exploited the guests on the show for profit.
Laura Grindstaff, UC Davis Assistant Professor of Sociology and ex-intern at the Jerry Springer Show, has extensively researched why and how these people are exploited. The main essence of the Jerry Spring Show is what Grindstaff calls “the money shot.” It’s the overflow of emotion, the “dramatic climax” that a guest experiences while being recorded. The producers are tasked with agitating guests enough to become angry and act out on camera.
The Executive Producer of the Jerry Springer Show, Richard Dominick, talks about their post-production editing choices too, through a cracked smile and a cigar between his fingers, “make it interesting with the sound off. Because a lot of people are just flipping through the tv–you hit the Jerry Springer Show… it’s got to make them want to stop.” Many of the design choices–camera angles, colors, and props–are curated for an insatiable shot in every scene.
A Race to the Bottom
Talk Shows of the 1990’s were in constant competition. They were all under intense pressure to bring stories that were even more outrageous than the last. The Jenny Jones Show took a scary and manipulative turn when they decided to help one gay man confess his love to another man (who claimed he was straight on the show).
Violence warning: This particular episode never aired because just a few days after taping, the straight man murdered the gay man.
Ratings and ads defined success for these shows without any moral compass or sympathy for the people who were lead (and, yes, some willingly) to perform. Grindstaff sums up this particular realm of entertainment, “these shows perpetuate a vulgar and tasteless stereotype about the poor and working-class people. It’s a vicious image of these people in our culture, and one that goes unchallenged.” It’s similar to how the New York Sun Newspaper used peoples’ stories. But often times these stories expanded beyond bigotry, classism, and stereotypes.
The Geraldo Rivera Talk Show
The Geraldo Rivera Talk Show started off with a bang when they invited black power activists and white supremacists as guests on the show. What more needs to be said? As soon as the show began, violence ensued with a mob of people throwing punches, chairs, and everything else for all the world to see.
The producers of these shows (like Richard Dominick) claim their intentions are never to insight violence… okay gaslighting. The Geraldo Rivera Show took over screens that week. People were watching and the ad time was being paid for. They raked in huge profits off the emotional “money shot” manipulation of their guests.
This business model is nothing new, but as technology has progressed, it’s getting closer-to-home. Most of social media is following an attention business model–the more time spent on the platform means you’re subjected to more ads. Someone is buying your attention even if you don’t want to give it.
Attention on the Subway
When I’m on the subway I’m often just in my head. Any New Yorker has their essential subway travel checklist and the first thing on that list is headphones. When I’m at work I have to be aware and engaged, but when I’m on my way home I can ignore what’s happening (within reason and safety) and disengage a bit.
It’s the in-between travel time when my human brain takes a break and my lizard brain fully engages. I’m thinking about work, about school, about a recipe that I’m writing down in my Notes app…
But what disrupts that intimate, inward reflection are ads. The subway is full of them, and with their bright colors, I can’t help but to swiftly look and read them. They rip me away from the thoughts I was swimming in. And with my pandemic brain I sometimes end up forgetting them for good haha.
Adtech companies have researched to better understand how to increase our attention too. Remember the Sun’s outrageous stories and Jerry Springer’s violent ones? David Lauer has talked in-depth about how Facebook’s algorithm “create[s] echo chambers where the most inflammatory content achieves the greatest visibility–Facebook profits from the proliferation of extremism, bullying, hate speech, disinformation, conspiracy theory, and rhetorical violence.”
Lasting Thoughts
- What are some examples of the attention economy in your life?
- Often times there are ways of buying your way out of the attention economy. Is that possible in the examples you brought up above?
- How do you think you interact with the attention economy in your life?
- How do you feel about “people being a product?”
- What do you see the attention economy morphing into in the coming years?
