What Is the Attention Economy and How to Avoid Its Influence 

Do you think ads are everywhere? You don’t even know how much. Now advertisers don’t just buy integrations from your favorite bloggers or target sites you’ve visited recently. Instead, they are interested in everything that interests you, like that same schoolgirl in love. Let’s find out why the attention economy is becoming more and more popular, how it affects you and how not to become a victim of it.

What Is the Attention Economy? 

The attention economy is a concept with human attention as its main resource. Attention and the subjects on which it is concentrated determine manufacturers’ offers. It can be not only products or actual services entering the market and setting the pace of production. Audience attention is determined by a much wider range of factors: world cultural and political events, high-profile premieres, events, speeches by public figures, and even what friends of the brand’s target audience say or write on social networks.

The main task of the brand within this concept is to monitor the focus of attention of its audience and offer products that correspond to the current situation. For example, this is how brands work with branded merchandise: if you went to see a new movie or at least watched a trailer, all brand collaborations with producers that are available for purchase, order online, or will match your income level will appear in your feed.

The attention economy was first mentioned in 1997 by the American physicist and economist Michael Goldhaber, who spoke at a conference on the digital economy. Back then, he talked more about how celebrities’ and brands’ incomes are growing in proportion to the attention they receive. For more than 20 years, digitalization has allowed the attention economy to take on much deeper roots. What influenced it?

The structure of the Internet and the availability of information  

Each user is free to receive and create information. Social networks, websites, forums, and online media have become platforms for obtaining new information, exchanging data, or refuting them.

Automation of search engines and news feeds  

Algorithms that give out, first of all, the sites that you looked at bring up the news of users of interest to you and form recommendations based on past requests. It is also a factor in the economy of attention: these algorithms limit the entire ocean of information to topics of interest of a particular user; thus, the manufacturer must catch the right wave.

The ability of users to influence their information environment

Among other things, users can hide the news of uninteresting accounts, buy subscriptions without ads, and install ad-blocking extensions on their devices. All this makes human attention an even more scarce resource for producers of goods and services.

Companies use several strategies to get into the field of view of the target audience: generate content and create newsbreaks that attract attention. Or they respond to the audience’s current interests (for example, some brands release exclusive collaborations with popular artists). To break through social media restrictions, brands launch targeted ads or post placements with bloggers.

How to Protect Yourself from the Attention Economy?  

You live in it, and it will be problematic to completely isolate yourself from brands’ presence in the information field. But there are a few ways to make life in the attention economy a little easier.

Digital Detox  

It is a temporary and voluntary refusal to use gadgets. It will help restore attention to content on social networks.

Ignoring

Another strategy is deliberately ignoring advertising built based on the attention economy. Cindy Goss, founder and president of renowned branding and marketing company Propel Business Solutions stated this bluntly, for example: “…either before. But people [still] don’t listen anymore.”

Critical distancing  

Another strategy is to develop critical thinking skills that allow us to distance from the flow of news that is trying to capture our attention. And the growing distrust to the information described above already signals that Internet users are gradually developing immunity to the new reality that the attention economy has brought with it.