Readings
Goldhaber, M.H. (1997). The Attention Economy and the Net. First Monday. 2 (4-7), April
This text is already 16 years old. It is at times tiring to read and only gets to the point halfway through. In my view, the following paragraphs were the essential content:
Goldhaber, M.H. (1997). The Attention Economy and the Net. First Monday. 2 (4-7), April
This text is already 16 years old. It is at times tiring to read and only gets to the point halfway through. In my view, the following paragraphs were the essential content:
./.
A summary of the lengthy Goldhaber text above:
Gauntlett, D. (2004). Basic Web Economics: How things work in the 'attention economy
[...] advertising and sponsorship. It's just the same as with commercial TV: you don't pay to watch the programmes. The programmes are paid for by advertisers, who, in return, get to display their ads to audiences alongside the shows.
Investors value Web companies based on an expectation of how powerful they think those companies will be in the future.
Newspapers charge an annual fee for site access. There was so much useful information available on the Web for free, it was discovered that no-one wanted to pay for it.
It has to be content that people are really desperate to get hold of. In other words, pornography. Porn sites which charge subscription fees are highly profitable. Unlike news or poetry, porn is something people are willing to pay for.
Advertising, sponsorship and e-commerce will be the new ways in which Britannica pays her rent -- in line with most other Web services. (Comment: It comes too late, Wikipedia has already taken this domain)
[...]people have got used to getting their information for free now.
Later, once Netscape had started charging non-educational users for its browser, Microsoft demolished Netscape's domination by giving its own new browser away [for] free. (Big business wasn't used to this idea: according to one book about Microsoft, when someone suggested to Bill Gates that his company should give away its Internet Explorer browser, he exploded and called the man a 'communist').
The scarce resource, which everybody with a presence on the internet is struggling for, is attention.
Goldhaber says: "Money flows to attention, and much less well does attention flow to money."
A summary of the lengthy Goldhaber text above:
Gauntlett, D. (2004). Basic Web Economics: How things work in the 'attention economy
[...] advertising and sponsorship. It's just the same as with commercial TV: you don't pay to watch the programmes. The programmes are paid for by advertisers, who, in return, get to display their ads to audiences alongside the shows.
Investors value Web companies based on an expectation of how powerful they think those companies will be in the future.
Newspapers charge an annual fee for site access. There was so much useful information available on the Web for free, it was discovered that no-one wanted to pay for it.
It has to be content that people are really desperate to get hold of. In other words, pornography. Porn sites which charge subscription fees are highly profitable. Unlike news or poetry, porn is something people are willing to pay for.
Advertising, sponsorship and e-commerce will be the new ways in which Britannica pays her rent -- in line with most other Web services. (Comment: It comes too late, Wikipedia has already taken this domain)
[...]people have got used to getting their information for free now.
Later, once Netscape had started charging non-educational users for its browser, Microsoft demolished Netscape's domination by giving its own new browser away [for] free. (Big business wasn't used to this idea: according to one book about Microsoft, when someone suggested to Bill Gates that his company should give away its Internet Explorer browser, he exploded and called the man a 'communist').
The scarce resource, which everybody with a presence on the internet is struggling for, is attention.
Goldhaber says: "Money flows to attention, and much less well does attention flow to money."
In other words, you can't buy attention. You can pay someone to listen to you, but you can't actually make them interested in what you have to say, unless they actually find it interesting. So money is less powerful than usual on the Web.
If attention is so important in this new economy, will money die out?
Funnily enough, Goldhaber says that yes, money will become less important, and that attention will be the new wealth. But since money shows little sign of extinction at the moment, perhaps it's a better use of the basic argument to say that attention certainly does equal wealth in the new economy, but that's because you can always translate it into good old-fashioned money, which everyone still thinks is pretty handy stuff.
Further reading: What motivates free software developers? -- Interview with Linus Torvalds.
If attention is so important in this new economy, will money die out?
Funnily enough, Goldhaber says that yes, money will become less important, and that attention will be the new wealth. But since money shows little sign of extinction at the moment, perhaps it's a better use of the basic argument to say that attention certainly does equal wealth in the new economy, but that's because you can always translate it into good old-fashioned money, which everyone still thinks is pretty handy stuff.
Further reading: What motivates free software developers? -- Interview with Linus Torvalds.
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