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Is The Attention Economy Dying? (theverge.com)
"The attention economy is dying, and it's not pretty," argues the Verge, adding "there is only so much time in the day to pay attention to things, and we as a society have reached the limit..."
"The base assumption that the whole edifice is built on is becoming unstable, because what happens when society's attention is entirely monopolized? A recent report put out by the media and technology research firm Midia underscores that point: "[E]ngagement has declined throughout the sector, suggesting that the attention economy has peaked. Consumers simply do not have any more free time to allocate to new attention seeking digital entertainment propositions, which means they have to start prioritising between them." The trend, they write, has persisted for a while, and only now promises a revenue slowdown -- as told through disappointing quarterly results from a few of the major games publishers. "Arguably sooner than most of the games industry would have thought." As Midia researcher Karol Severin says, "competition within the attention economy is now more intense than ever before."
The problem is attention doesn't scale. There is only so much time in the day to be advertised to; ads themselves are becoming less effective, because they're now everywhere. When was the last time you consumed something that wasn't trying to sell you something, or harvest your personal data to sell you things better?
The article also argues that a "substantial portion" of the attention economy has been captured by the videogame Fortnite. "Last month, Netflix mentioned in its 2018 earnings report that 'we compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO'...
"That Netflix is even acknowledging Fortnite as a competitor is important, because it means that digital media companies are beginning to concede that growth isn't infinite, and are shifting their ambitions in response."
"The base assumption that the whole edifice is built on is becoming unstable, because what happens when society's attention is entirely monopolized? A recent report put out by the media and technology research firm Midia underscores that point: "[E]ngagement has declined throughout the sector, suggesting that the attention economy has peaked. Consumers simply do not have any more free time to allocate to new attention seeking digital entertainment propositions, which means they have to start prioritising between them." The trend, they write, has persisted for a while, and only now promises a revenue slowdown -- as told through disappointing quarterly results from a few of the major games publishers. "Arguably sooner than most of the games industry would have thought." As Midia researcher Karol Severin says, "competition within the attention economy is now more intense than ever before."
The problem is attention doesn't scale. There is only so much time in the day to be advertised to; ads themselves are becoming less effective, because they're now everywhere. When was the last time you consumed something that wasn't trying to sell you something, or harvest your personal data to sell you things better?
The article also argues that a "substantial portion" of the attention economy has been captured by the videogame Fortnite. "Last month, Netflix mentioned in its 2018 earnings report that 'we compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO'...
"That Netflix is even acknowledging Fortnite as a competitor is important, because it means that digital media companies are beginning to concede that growth isn't infinite, and are shifting their ambitions in response."
No shit, Sherlock.
They're scared of the competition.
Was never a thing, let alone a viable thing, to begin with. If you thought otherwise, you have exactly zero understanding of other humans, and are a rube.
Too much music going on right now...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The entertainment economy has always competed with the entertainment economy.
Guess what, they're competing with imported chocolate, too.
And skating rinks. And fancy restaurants.
The Verge did a good job of drawing attention to itself when it copyright striked two channels for reaction videos to their terrible PC build video and prompting the community to donate $7,000 for #SomethingPositive on Twitter.
We could have been training deep sea explorers. We could have been training cosmonauts. We could have been building subterranean villages in the arctic.
We have instead chosen the future of constant consumerism, lootboxes, maximum debt, the destruction of the id and also ego via social media, the desecration of historical identity.
The Georgia Guidestones did nothing wrong.
My suspicion is that everyone is wrong that Fortnite is a popular game. Fortnite is actually the next social media platform that younger kids have jumped onto. It's a platform that importantly does not include their parents. True?
1. Put more quality in your product.
2. Don't chase me off if I value my security and privacy more than your ad revenue. Find better revenue streams.
3. Be relevant.
4. Don't be evil.
5. Understand your fan base.
"When was the last time you consumed something that wasn't trying to sell you something, or harvest your personal data to sell you things better?"
I guess that means there is still a group beyond that refused to be suckered. Funnily, I didn't explicitly try to avoid ads. They just happen to not appear with scripting disabled.
I wasn't paying attention. What were we talking about again?
#DeleteChrome
No way we have reached the end of the attention economy. We still have not had all the people complaining about big attention and where are all the journalists saying that peak attention is here.
when you conflate your personal point of view with the state of the world but then communication technology improves, the whole world is affected by your personal problems.
Also this is called solipsism.
Economic systems are based on scarcity. The fact that our attention is limited is the reason that there can be an attention economy. It doesn't mean the opposite, that the attention economy has come to an end.
Maybe we just don't want to read garbage like The Verge anymore.
Netflix stated that 'we compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO'. How are they measuring this? How do they know I'm playing Fortnite and not doing something unrelated like web development, programming, finishing the book "Atomic Habits", finishing reading some novel like "The King's Blood", or commenting on a tech forum? I would agree that all metrics point to a lot of people playing Fortnite, and maybe other metrics like less people watching Netflix, but how do they correlate the two?
Marshmello seems to be smarter than all those "ad men".
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
For years everyone has known that using a cellphone when driving is dangerous. The evidence is overwhelming. Yet the federal government has done nothing about it, largely due to the telecom lobbyists. But local governments are taking notice and passing laws. Several of them where I live have done just that due to pressures from their constituents.
To me, this is a sign of backlash against mobile devices. People walking around like fucking zombies glued to their phones. It is similar in some ways to the backlash against smoking. It had nothing to do with the fact that smoking is bad for the smoker. It had everything to do with the fact that it stinks and it potentially bad for the non smoker.
Sooner or later the phone zombie will be shunned and instead of being seen as hip will be seen as a loser. Everything goes in cycles and this is yet another one, only to be replaced by the next fad.
Nobody there knows what they're talking about, they're bloggers LARPing as journalists. 11 people signed off on this project from a supposed tech journalist. Why anyone would lend any weight to what they have to say is mind-boggling.
How is a shitty game like fortnite compete with Netflix? I know lots of people who watch Netflix but no one who plays fortnite.
How the fuck does someone consume data or media?
I don't ever pay attention to commercials but if one is obnoxious enough to catch my eye it goes on the blacklist so ads are not a problem. Granted, most Americans are stupid enough to want to be advertised to(Super Bowl ads? LOL) but even those low IQ mongs will eventually figure it out.
People not paying attention to ads or spending less time gaming or whatever is not a problem so no solution is necessary.
numbnuts
No attention economy is alive and well!
As a renowned Slashdot collaborator living in San Jose, I still get a lot of attention on Slashdot although I left Slashdot after 30+ years...
--
Rocketman - Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan - William Shatner Trailer
Consider the source. This is the same group of companies that went after actual technical Youtubers for debunking their PC "upgrading video".
Stop giving them any attention.
Everyday I consume food. The food doesn't want my data. The food doesn't sell me data
Don't force them to mandate you watch their propaganda. Get with the program.
and just when I thought that so many TV commercials were featuring radio hits of the 80s...we now have Facebook becoming this generations AOL and Fortnite as the new Second Life. -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life ..and you hipsters think you're so original....all that was will be once more...
After all those engagements, it was to be expected that the attention economy is finally settling down with a wife and kids.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Germany's fertility rate is 1.5. They are dying.
Let them die.
Japan and Italy are even lower. So even if they had won WW2, it wouldn't have mattered in the long run.
Publicly traded companies have an Embedded Growth Obligation (EGO) due to the expectations of shareholders and the market. Nothing can grow forever, but the market seems to think that sustaining certain customer level for decades is equivalent to death. This will change eventually, due to the laws of physics, but it is likely to be a rough ride.
They are not a reputable tech news outlet. Especially after this
http://saveie6.com/
Netflix CEO has all but officially declared a war on introverts. That's not a good stand if you want to compete for attention of people who get their kicks from digital media.
They're trying to hide the fact that time is getting shorter as the universe's expansion accelerates.
Shitty stupid sand n1ggers will die too, whats your point.
Don't worry, Fuhrer Merkel will import millions of "refugees" to replace the German people whom her policies are killing off.
The dupe ecopnomy is thriving!
https://games.slashdot.org/sto...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yet the federal government has done nothing about it, largely due to the telecom lobbyists. But local governments are taking notice and passing laws.
Wow, they passed some laws! Awesome! Then in areas where they have passed laws, citizens have entirely stopped using phones in cars, just as they have stopped speeding thanks to local speed limits.
Oh wait. In fact the laws have exactly ZERO effect on behavior apart from the state mining slightly more money from citizens. Just as people still speed, people still use phones in cases because people are people.
If you actually cared about dangers of cell phones use in cars, you would push for something that actually resulted in less danger from that activity - basically meaning a big push for autonomous or semi-autonomous driving abilities for all cars. But how much money would that earn the Sate? None, that's how much - in fact it would be a tremendous loss from speeding and cell phone use fines never to be collected.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There is still plenty of room for the attention industry. If I can pay off my mortgage by paying attention to the industry they can have all my attention they want.
The point being: The population of your typically well off countries is in decline, and the majority of the world's population are in India and China.
Maybe you lot should stop fucking your sister cousins if you want to have any hope of producing large numbers of healthy offspring.
Or go learn Mandarin/Hindi
And its doubtful i ever will.
Its a shooter, & i'm bored to death with shooters.
I have other reasons for not having a netflix account. I used to have one, and then for about 3 months in a row i failed to find anything at all on there that i wanted to watch... so i cancelled. Isnt that what you're supposed to do when youre no longer enjoying the service?
I havent really missed it much either.
Why is everybody so surprised in the financial sector every time the growth of starts to level off?
Fuck you and fuck your shitty smelly hindu-chimps breeding like fucking cockroaches. Exterminate them, problem solved.
A while ago, capitalism "discovered" intellectual "property". As of short, it "thought" it to be the solution to sustained exponential growth -- the lifeblood of The Behemoth, which threatened to dry out as colonial expansion had bumped against the finiteness of the Earth and the (as for now) unreachability of the (near) Solar system.
But... the bottleneck is in the consumer! Attempts at widening that bottleneck (clickbait, nudging, telemetry and other creepy techniques) only brought a constant factor. Exponential growth on the asset side now means... exponential depreciation! A Youtube video isn't worth much anymore: why should a Netflix blockbuster? Why some Hollywood "content"?
A while ago I worked for a "media company" (they like to depict themselves as "quality journalism", go figure). The way they talked about "content" sounded quite like "contempt". Now: would you expect to sell that stuff?
Any law which cannot be enforced, no matter how good the intentions, is a bad law. At best it teaches people to have no respect for the law in general. At worst it provides corrupt police with a convenient excuse to arrest people they dislike for any reason.
How? Most of your core components are built by the Chinese and the software by the Indians. Trumps big button probably has like a 30-70 ratio of non- to Asian. And both those countries have nukes too.
Good luck. You lost the war before you even had time to make it up in your insecure imagination.
Let me fix that for you:
Is the attention economy land-grab petering out?
Betteridge's law of headlines carves out an important exception for headlines of the form:
Does what goes up, still go down?
even when i didn't have a job yet and could spend almost every waking hour on whatever i wanted, i still didn't have enough time to do all the things i wanted to do. ...
this hasn't improved with getting a job, wife & kids, house,
you'll always have to make choices what to do with your free time, i don't understand how there are people who are bored.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
https://xkcd.com/1227/
Anti environmentalists don't know that environmentalists do, however,and they willingly lap up propaganda from the propollution industries with shibboleths and flat out lies pretending that environmentalists don't.
Hows it feel to be the led when you think you're a leader?
Not getting mown down by a half-ton vehicle driven by a dribbling moron sexting his dickpicks to random women is part of ensuring the general welfare.
Fucking moron.
And when will you demand the disband of the military, since that right is not part of the constitution either? AND give up your vote. Not part of the constitution. As proven for your kind not having the vote for generations, only barely beating out the women for the vote.
I disagree. Fewer people using phones in cars leads to fewer traffic accidents and fatalities. My point has nothing to do with the State collecting more money. It is about public safety. And I say this knowing that auto manufacturers are as much at fault as anyone else. They cram every electronic gadget under the sun into the new cars and those certainly cause driver distraction as well.
You want self driving cars? Sure I'm all for that. But the technology is not there yet. My fear is that autonomous cars will only really work if ALL cars are autonomous, not just some of them. Trying to predict erratic human behavior behind the wheel has proven to be extremely difficult. Erratic behavior like using cellphones and in car gadgets :-)
It's just switched from being a growth market to a mature market. And, as such, the game becomes how to take market share* away from your competitors.
*arguably, this was always the case. It was just new media taking market share from newspapers, televised sports, movies, etc. Now, new media is also competing against new media.
The big corps want more time to market to us? Then they need to lobby for a four day workweek, with wages staying the same or going up.
I would argue that a substantial portion of people do not play fortnite.
How much of their own attention do business leaders at the top of the food chain allow to take part in the Attention Economy? Beyond a certain point, doesn't spending loads of time binge-watching, playing games, etc, make one less likely to be creative, to innovate, and to successfully strategize in business and in personal endeavours? OTOH, it seems to me that overloading the mental processing power of the plebs with trivialities makes them more pliable and, (perhaps paradoxically), less likely to inquire deeply into the activities of the point-one-percenters. The attention economy is all about fleecing average people while undermining their ability to rise above the average and make full use of their capabilities.
I don't even have to posit a conspiracy to make this argument work - it's possible that things either evolved this way or we ended up here largely by chance. However, there is ample evidence of such a conspiracy in our education system dating back more than a century. For more on the characteristics and consequences of the education system that was created by the Robber Barons for their own purposes, see John Taylor Gatto's book. (PDF).
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Don't worry, Fuhrer Merkel will import millions of "refugees" to replace the German people whom her policies are killing off.
Sad but true. Through diversity Europe has lost its diversity.
thanks admin
The fact that they mention an individual product (fortnite, which is 95% people without jobs) as a culprit is ridiculous. Blaming economic "trends" is the new boogeyman for mismanaged companies (netflix content is turning into garbage lately - Electronic Arts have mismanaged valuable gaming IPs like star wars and etc for years as well) that have produced garbage for years straight and then want to reconcile the bubble they put themselves in when their revenue starts dipping.
NO. NO. NO. It's not a market cap, it's your shitty management practices and bad product planning that lost revenue.
I feel like I have the attention span of a goldfish crackers are delicious.
Any law which cannot be enforced, no matter how good the intentions, is a bad law. At best it teaches people to have no respect for the law in general. At worst it provides corrupt police with a convenient excuse to arrest people they dislike for any reason.
Texting while driving laws can be enforced. I see it happen daily. I doubt a police officer would have to wait more than 5 minutes to find one. The problem is, they are not enforcing it in my city.
That's not generous, it's stingy. So is the food prep. You're using mandatory tasks to remove free time, so "generous", implying giving the other side the benefit of the doubt, is to minimize the time. So if you assume 10 minutes reheating a pizza (eaten while you play) and 10 minutes showering, that's generous.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
This isn't a case of a law that CAN'T be enforced. It's a case of competition for which law to enforce. Plus, all things equal, they will enforce the easiest law. The easiest to enforce is speeding even though like 2-4% of accidents are found to be primarily caused by excess speed over the limit.
Awwww Orange Fan Sad?
These "entertainment" companies are no longer growing as fast as they were. They're still making money but not more money than last time. That ticks off their investors.
"Advertising" companies are running out new product (i.e your attention) to sell.
Oh wow. You're so edgy! Posting racist comments anonymously!