The Question of the Week: How Does the Attention Economy Work?

The first thing many people do after waking is reach for a phone. A few minutes of scrolling may seem harmless, but that daily reflex feeds a business model built around capturing attention.

Economists call it the “attention economy”. The idea was theorised half a century ago by Herbert Simon, who argued that abundant information would make human capacity to process it the scarce resource. Michael Goldhaber popularised the concept in the late 1990s. It has since become central to the business models of some of the world’s most valuable technology companies.

Adults now check their smartphones between 100 and more than 200 times a day, according to recent studies cited by La Presse, or roughly once every five minutes. For companies, each glance creates an opportunity to keep users engaged and turn that engagement into revenue.

The model contains a built-in tension. Cognitive science can help companies protect attention through simpler interfaces, relevant information filters and fewer unnecessary interruptions. Marketing and advertising, however, seek to capture that same attention and convert it into income. The two approaches can coexist within one company, and sometimes within one product.

On free platforms, the user is not the customer but the product, the article argues. Companies sell advertisers access to aggregated and measured attention, while content serves mainly to build an audience. That helps explain the competition to make notifications, interfaces and other digital features increasingly difficult to ignore.

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In a world where information would become abundant, it would no longer be information that was lacking, but the human capacity to process it.