Attention in the digital era

The digital era and the digital economy are driven by industrial disruptions such as Amazon — e-commerce, Facebook — social interaction, Netflix — entertainment, Uber — transportation and many such ventures. The key aspects of a digital economy are scale and speed. Scale conveys these digital ventures capture a user base of millions (if not billions). Speed conveys their ability to grow and adapt to the market at a rapid scale. I was wondering how they are able to sustain such scales and speed, pioneering disruptions in the industry. The answer needs one to look at their history in some detail — it is a combination of trust, value, and ease of use. Amazon and Facebook had to develop trust with the consumer, Netflix and Uber provided ease of use. The common ingredient they all provide is some aspect of value to their consumers. If you don’t use their particular service, they probably don’t provide much value to you. This is a problem which all these companies are trying to answer through rigorous experimentation aimed at adding value.

The business models evolved from one-time buys like cars and homes to subscription-based leasing and streaming, which further evolved into on-demand based ride shares and rentals. This does not mean that people don’t buy cars anymore but are given the choice of using a ride-share. The value is that you do not have to find parking, pay for insurance, fuel, and maintenance. Netflix’s subscription-based service is effective because the cost of on-demand video is still high — buying a video on Amazon, apple tv or google play is high. A single episode of the popular show friends is not available on Amazon, $1.99 on apple and google for Standard definition and $2.99 for high definition. Netflix provides high definition content of all episodes for $10.99 a month with access to many other movies and shows. The graphic below illustrates the difference in the entertainment market -

It becomes apparent they are estimating the value creation of each acquisition. The method of estimating the value could be through viewership and search history on Netflix, but other avenues such as IMDB activity, Reddit posts and google trends can be leveraged. I would term this “estimating the pulse” or “gauging the interest” of the consumer through data logs and interactions. Amazon, Facebook, Uber, Google and most, if not all digital companies use many metrics for gauging the attention of their user base. Attention can be measured by the interactions, search query, click through rate, focused dwell time, recorded interactions with customer service. The measures are attempting to understand the consumer and find the best way to capture their intention. Thus, understanding what a user’s attention is focused on, their pain points and optimization of the product to capture attention.

An illustration of this can be seen in this news snippet by PBS. The show starts with the statement

Attention is a basic concept in human cognition. It is one of the pillars for guiding perception and information processing to instantiate memory and recollection. A pursuit of marketing and business is to capture attention and influence your decision. Thus, attention is a valuable concept in business and economics as much as psychology.

The human attention landscape is a valuable commodity and understanding it is essential to avoid harm and gain sustainable success in attentional engineering.

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