Why Does Attention Economy Make You a Business product?
Nowadays, the Attention Economy is seen all over the Internet. The digital era’s most valuable resource is attention. We now have unrestricted access to vast amounts of data. Anyone with an internet connection can access everything. You will see examples of the attention economy and how do we provide our attention.
What is the Attention Economy?
The Attention Economy is the global human potential to engage with the diverse aspects of our environments that demand mental focus. Anything that tries to attract our limited attention is part of the Attention Economy.
The growing market for digital advertising, the development, and massification of Smartphones, Artificial Intelligence, the trade of private data have turned the social media black hole that absorbs insane amounts of human attention.
We use free social media programs to stay connected, learn new things, and obtain information every day. However, they evaluate our activities and the data we disclose, and they use what they discover about us to make us pay more attention to them than we desire.
Companies are focusing their efforts on making money. They’re advertising that they think we’ll be interested in and doing everything they can to get our attention. Advertisers pay for our attention, which leads to changes in our thinking and behaviour. These social media products are competing for our attention to generate revenue.
What does Attention Economy attract?
Social networking apps are compelled to develop increasingly effective strategies — such as notifications, targeted content, tailored feeds. The Internet tracks and analyzes everything we do. Everything we’ve ever clicked on, how long we’ve paused over a post on our screen, how far down our friends’ profiles we’ve scrolled – it’s all data that corporations use to understand us better. They can monitor behaviours such as:
- What kind of videos do we watch?
- The news that we read
- The things that we look for
- Who do we speak with?
- Which postings do we linger over?
How the Attention Economy Expands Marketing?
- A new type of marketing is emerging due to a remarkable increase in the precision of location-tracking technologies in recent years. Beacons that use Bluetooth or Wi-Fi to convey alerts about local offers to passers-by are becoming more popular.
- Renting someone else’s audience can help you get started. Influencer marketing options have rapidly expanded and diversified. Micro-influencers are now available to include products in their content and collaborate with marketers.
- Sensory branding is using our senses to promote new messages. Scent marketing is a powerful tool for changing our perceptions and attracting onlookers.
How do we provide our attention? Examples of Attention Economy
We can get a lot of information for free and don’t have to pay for it doesn’t imply it’s free. We may have a lot of knowledge, but we must pay attention to it to integrate, understand, and act on it. Finding time to read or look at the stuff accessible to us is the present difficulty, not seeing things to read or information to pay attention to. Examples of Attention Economy are the Mobile Phone, Internet, and OTT.
Internet
Today’s Attention Economy prompts businesses to lure visitors into spending more time on their websites. Web Designers and applications are well aware that their products compete for limited user attention in a crowded market. Like Youtube, you can either pay to watch adless content or give your attention and watch ads. You have various examples of this kind of website and apps.
Design styles have become popular as a result of the need to draw attention, such as:
- Animations effects
- Catchy Layouts
- Advertising campaigns
Following the launch of Google’s Digital Wellbeing features, Facebook and Instagram unveiled additional tools such as Reels for users to set time restrictions on their platforms and a dashboard to track daily usage. The corporations implied that spending time on the Internet is not a good habit but rather a delightful vice that, if left unchecked, might evolve into addiction.
OTT
OTT is the most effective advertising medium because of its enormous reach and strong viewer engagement. People are switching to OTT such as Netflix, Amazon. People wish to cut the cable for a variety of reasons. The most prevalent reason is that they can watch the stuff they desire online without needing a TV subscription.
Mobile Phones
We spend 90% of our media time on mobile devices, mostly in apps, and 10% on the mobile web. We don’t need smartphone data to determine that practically every mobile website has a mobile app. Even if we eliminate gaming, social media, and other forms of entertainment, we spend more time using apps on the Internet.
How are we affected by the Attention Economy?
- Many of us are unhappy with how much time we spend on our phones. It makes us feel horrible about ourselves, and we’re starting to believe it’s not “healthy.”
- We take up our phones again to divert ourselves from our anxiety or cheer ourselves up by sharing a picture on social media and receiving likes.
- No one intends to spend any time on social media. There is no aim behind using it, and the action will always be hollow, devoid of meaning.
How to optimize your attention?
- Deep work is a period of uninterrupted concentration on strenuous activities when your productivity and creativity are at their height. Deep work, especially when mixed with deep play, can aid in the development of higher-quality attention. Set aside time for both, and you’ll notice a significant improvement in your focus.
- It’s pointless to multitask on complex activities because we can’t. Instead, concentrate on accomplishing chores without being distracted.
- We must learn to control and limit the amount of information we get. The Internet provides a lot of high-quality data that is easily accessible, but we must know where to look and avoid psychological traps. We risk becoming dumbed down in irrelevance if we don’t use a filter.
Conclusion
This era could be described as the economy of distraction rather than the Attention Economy. In truth, the actual battle is to break consumers’ concentration and focus, even if just for a few seconds. The ability to quantify attention through tags, clicks, views, likes, and presumably boosting our ability to understand and influence consumers is an important aspect of this economy.
Let us know in the comments if you know more examples of the attention economy
