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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.
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.
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?
"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.
Actually, Wikipedia gives a nice definition of what "Attention Economy" is:
Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems. ...
As content has grown increasingly abundant and immediately available, attention becomes the limiting factor in the consumption of information.
All this seems eminently reasonable and well-supportable to me. As to what advertising executives and "content providers" mean when they use the term "attention economy", well they might not mean anything in particular. Such people often use words for how they feel rather than what they denote.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I wasn't paying attention. What were we talking about again?
#DeleteChrome
1. If I'm your subscriber, I'm not your free QA dev/beta tester
2. If I'm your subsciber, I'm not going to have patience for an ad platform.
3. Breaking up a product into DLC'S may chase me away forever.
4. I don't have time to be pinched for pennies.
5. I don't have time for fecal level support.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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
Why is everybody so surprised in the financial sector every time the growth of starts to level off?
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.
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?
Such people
You're being generous...
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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.
Well, it's apparent that your world view is not correct for the rest of the world. It may be absolutely accurate in your circle of acquaintances, but apparently people, in general, like Fortnite more than Netflix. I don't use either, but that doesn't lead me to believe that nobody else does.. They're both pretty successful companies.
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.
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.
I feel like I have the attention span of a goldfish crackers are delicious.
Which is why the phrase "suggesting that the attention economy has peaked" makes zero sense. Attention was always scarce. People who were making money were doing so for mostly two reasons. Those are that people were naive and easily tricked, and the medium was novel. People are catching on though and the used car salesmen of the Entertainment industry are eventually being seen for what they are and hence attention is shifting. They could fix this by adapting, but they are a bunch of useless crybabies and so they'll just have a fit and pound the dark earth instead.
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.
Oh wow. You're so edgy! Posting racist comments anonymously!