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Is The Attention Economy Dying? (theverge.com) 139

Posted by EditorDavid from the finite-resources dept.
"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."
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Is The Attention Economy Dying? More

Is The Attention Economy Dying?

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  • Growth isn't infinite (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    No shit, Sherlock.

  • Too much music going on right now...

  • Video Killed the Radio Star (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Aighearach ( 97333 ) on Sunday March 03, 2019 @07:51PM (#58210260)

    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.

    • Re:Video Killed the Radio Star (Score:4)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday March 04, 2019 @05:51AM (#58211746) Homepage Journal

      There is more to it than just competition. People have been burned so many times they are not engaging any more.

      All the good stuff on TV gets cancelled, so don't get too engaged with that. Online is full of scams and you find that thing you were really into is just some shitty viral marketing campaign. Everyone you liked turns out to be a milkshake duck.

      There is also the rise of streaming that means everything is transient and probably won't be available in a year or two, so no point getting attached to it.

      • None of that is new.

        Weird Al released "I Can't Watch This" in 1992, long before most people even knew what the "internet" was or had local access. I listen to that song way more often than I watch a television. Jefferson Airplane released the song Plastic Fantastic Lover in 1967, before I was born, which is also about television. And it dovetails nicely with social media concerns; the last verse is

        Data Control and IBM
        Science is mankind's brother
        But all I see is drainin' me
        On my plastic fantastic lover

        Online scams are nothing new; in the olden days they were conducted by mail. And like the internet, just becaus

  • I don't know... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 03, 2019 @08:00PM (#58210284)
    The Verge did a good job of drawing attention to itself when it copyright striked two channels [youtube.com] for reaction videos to their terrible PC build video and prompting the community to donate $7,000 for #SomethingPositive [youtu.be] on Twitter.

  • Help me understand Fortnite. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by owlaf ( 5251737 )
      It isn't just fortnite that is a social media platform and game. I had played GTA way back but stopped after a while. I watch some vids of the latest version, and you see how you can play with a group of friends with audio chat between the whole time. There are many others

  • Since always! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by evanh ( 627108 ) on Sunday March 03, 2019 @08:02PM (#58210300)

    "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 guess you never watched or listened to an episode of the Ben Shapiro show. He will stop mid-sentence to deliver an ad.

  • I wasn't paying attention. What were we talking about again?

  • Probably has not happened yet. (Score:5, Funny)

    by will_die ( 586523 ) on Sunday March 03, 2019 @08:12PM (#58210328) Homepage
    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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Loads of youtubers were doing just fine on ads... until Youtube crippled it AND then decided that anything other than a hyper-progressive nutjob view was not allowed. There were niches all over the place. Now it's all being squashed in an attempt to return to the kind of control the establishment used to enjoy when its messengers in the mainstream media fed swill to the proles.

  • Why do so many people get economics backwards? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 03, 2019 @08:23PM (#58210352)

    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.

    • Re:Why do so many people get economics backwards? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sgage ( 109086 ) on Sunday March 03, 2019 @09:27PM (#58210524)

      Exactly. In fact, you could say the 'attention economy' is now beginning. There is no longer enough 'attention' for dozens of companies to experience exponential growth every year - now they are really going to have to compete. Like in the real economy.

    • It's bloody obvious, and always has been, that there are 24 hours in a day, 8 of which you typically spend asleep.

      It's a ten dollar name for a ten cent idea, and now the "influencers": and other bullshit artists are latching onto it.

      • Re:Why do so many people get economics backwards? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Tyger-ZA ( 1886544 ) on Monday March 04, 2019 @04:01AM (#58211538)

        It's bloody obvious, and always has been, that there are 24 hours in a day, 8 of which you typically spend asleep.

        It's a ten dollar name for a ten cent idea, and now the "influencers": and other bullshit artists are latching onto it.

        24 hours in a day, about 8 spent asleep, 8 at work, maybe an hour in traffic, maybe another 2 hours on the preparation and consumption of food, maybe another hour for washing yourself (being generous here, I know some of you won't even shower daily)

        That's already 20 hours gone out of a day, leaving just 4 hours for whatever random errands and entertainment (not even taking into account time spent fucking your partner or parenting)

        The publishers think they can make those who don't work grind their way through the game while those of us with jobs will pay to skip the grind. They didn't consider that we paying customers will stop paying, leaving them with millions spent to make a game, and millions more spent on servers that need to remain running for people who will grind instead of pay. How many times can they take that sort of financial hit before the shareholders leave?

        I'm looking forward to a gaming market crash, hopefully some valuable franchises will get liberated from their greedy owners during liquidation proceedings and get picked up by whoever is left to actually make good games again

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          You must be preparing very elaborate meals for it to take 2 hours a day. You could surely optimize that.

          • You must be preparing very elaborate meals for it to take 2 hours a day. You could surely optimize that.

            2 hours on the preparation and consumption of food

            I don't know what slave driver you work for, but I go away during lunchtime for an hour. The other hour is for the other meals in a day.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              My employer provides decent lunch meals for people who want them. Zero prep time, they take care of all that.

              Before this place I used to go out too, but even then most of that was not spent solely preparing or eating food. In fact much of it was spent reading news or posting on Slashdot.

        • , maybe another hour for washing yourself (being generous here, I know some of you won't even shower daily)

          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.

      • It's bloody obvious, and always has been, that there are 24 hours in a day, 8 of which you typically spend asleep.

        This is not right though. Smartphones changed the game by increasing where we could consume digital media, thus allowing us to spend more time on it. Of course this came at the cost of paying attention to the kids' soccer game, or having a conversation with the person whose car we're riding in, or whatever we used to do with that time. But it was an increase in the amount of those 24 hours

        • Until that number reaches 25, my point still stands.

          • Until that number reaches 25, my point still stands.

            And that's why the mods were wrong to give "insightful" to the guy following you who went to great pains to quantify the day. As long as there's only 24 hours in a day, it doesn't matter what you are using them for if there is competition for all 24 of them. Trying to say there are only 4 hours available is not insightful, it's myopic. It also ignores multitasking, like making dinner while watching TV, or watching videos at work.

            • Until that number reaches 25, my point still stands.

              And that's why the mods were wrong to give "insightful" to the guy following you who went to great pains to quantify the day. As long as there's only 24 hours in a day, it doesn't matter what you are using them for if there is competition for all 24 of them. Trying to say there are only 4 hours available is not insightful, it's myopic. It also ignores multitasking, like making dinner while watching TV, or watching videos at work.

              His point and mine still stand.

              All of the replies to counter the argument miss the point because they're debating *exactly* how much one might spend on any of the tasks, and/or how much time is spent on multitasking.

              The point being that there are only 24 hours in a day, most of which are engaged in "non monetized" tasks, and you don't get to increase the number of hours in a day

              If I bothered to quantify how long everything takes down the the minute, someone will still be on here moaning that it's not accur

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's certainly changing though. Part of that is due to the shear volume of stuff competing for attention. Remember when there were four TV channels? Now multi-million dollar productions are competing with cat videos on YouTube.

      Streaming has also made media transient and disposable. Back in the 90s I modded my brother's Playstation to play imports and backups... Games, even bad ones, used to get huge time investments due to scarcity and high cost, but within a few months he was often spending more time burni

      • shear volume

        It transforms a cuboid into a parallelepiped?

      • Streaming has also made media transient and disposable.

        Remember when there were three TV channels? Media has for the vast majority of time been transient and disposable. People spent a dime going to see the latest installment of the action serial at the movie house, and had only fond memories of last week's episode. VCRs tried to change the transient nature of "media" and did quite a bit to help. DVRs have replaced that, but leave you with intangible things called "files" instead of a tape or DVD. Streaming is just a new wrinkle, not a new paradigm.

      • The real problem for media companies is the cat videos are winning.

  • How are they measuring this? (Score:3)

    by Tolvor ( 579446 ) on Sunday March 03, 2019 @08:31PM (#58210378)

    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".

  • I think this is true (Score:3)

    by erp_consultant ( 2614861 ) on Sunday March 03, 2019 @08:34PM (#58210392)

    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.

    • 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

      Have you read the Constitution? There is nothing in it that gives the federal government jurisdiction over driving.

      But local governments are taking notice and passing laws.

      As they should. That is what local governments are for.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by DogDude ( 805747 )
        I don't know if you know, but there have been thousands, probably millions of laws written about things that aren't in the US Constitution. That's because the US Constitution was written more than 300 years ago. They didn't have cars then. Or electricity.
        • Most laws exist at the state and not the federal level. Federal laws are struck down as unconstitutional all the time simply because they should be left to the states to decide. In fact even more federal laws should be struck down for being unconstitutional. Just because there are unconstitutional laws doesn't argue for their continued existence nor does it argue for more of them.

      • There is nothing in it that gives the federal government jurisdiction over driving.

        Except on federally funded "postal highways", which is explicit. Or the fact that trucking is vital for "interstate commerce". Oh, and since people drive from state to state with driver's licenses, there's the "full faith and credit" clause too. And of course, there's the "necessary and proper" clause.

    • 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

      • 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.

        • 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.

      • 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 wi

  • The Verge is trash (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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. [youtube.com] Why anyone would lend any weight to what they have to say is mind-boggling.

  • Stop reading the Verge (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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.

  • 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 [slashdot.org]

  • The dupe ecopnomy is thriving!

    https://games.slashdot.org/sto... [slashdot.org]

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • In capitalism, a thing is either growing or it's dying. Like cancer.

      But I'm glad that TPTB are realizing that human attention is a finite resource, this should kill off the capitalists' hopes that we can all become YouTube stars or Instagram influencers to keep this clusterfuck rolling along in the face of mass unemployment from automation - as if there's no problem with the hellishness of everyone having to work such a degrading job. Actual camwhores seem to have a more dignified profession.

    • Nobody is, it is just that the high growth opportunities offer better returns and are thus more interesting to the financial pundits the general public normally hears about. There are trillions invested in slow to normal growth securities, but they don't get blog posts. It is much the same problem that affects science reporting (or any other niche) targeted at general audiences.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • I feel like I have the attention span of a goldfish crackers are delicious.

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