The Business of Attention: What We Lose When Everything Competes for It
When attention becomes the product, the incentives of the products we use and the interests of the people using them begin to drift apart.
Every product makes a promise about what it will do for you. Some also have a second, quieter goal: to hold your attention for as long as possible. When those two goals align, everyone wins. When they diverge, the second usually prevails, because it is the one that gets measured.
A scarce resource with a price
Decades ago, Herbert Simon noted that information consumes the attention of its recipients.1 What has changed since is scale. Attention is now bought and sold continuously, and a large share of the internet is organized around capturing it.
This is not a conspiracy. It is an incentive. If revenue rises with time spent, then features that increase time spent will be favored, tested and refined — whether or not they leave users better off.
What gets crowded out
The cost is rarely dramatic. It shows up as substitution:
- Long-form reading displaced by short, frequent checks.
- Deliberate choices displaced by default recommendations.
- Boredom — often the starting point for reflection — displaced by an always-available feed.
The question to ask of any product is simple: does it want my attention, or does it want to be worth it?
A different standard
Not every business needs to compete for attention. Some of the most durable products are the ones people use briefly and leave satisfied: a good tool, a reliable reference, a newsletter that respects your time.
For builders, that is an opportunity. For readers, it is a useful filter. Value what gives your attention back.
Sources & references
- Herbert A. Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” in Martin Greenberger (ed.), Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest. Johns Hopkins Press, 1971. ↩
