Attention Economy: Free Flow Narrative of What Makes the Internet Work

January 7, 2025

The internet is the exo-cortex of civilization and culture. It was designed to CONNECT any human with any information. Then came the big tech, and internet evolved to FEEDING targeted information to targeted humans. (Indexing and Personalization).

This is attention economy, a large part of physical goods and commerce shifted online as the attention economy boomed, and then came the creator economy, the golden child of attention economy.

Attention economy also comes with many other problems, like harnessing our attention as if it’s a memetic shoggoth. It takes our attention, and has us doomscrolling, and leaves us with no choice.

So, what’s the economical and behavioral model that feeds this structure? And is there an alternate structure that adds meaning to the lives of users while still maximizing shareholder value?

Economy on the Internet

Again, the point of Internet (or, World Wide Web to be precise), is to connect humans with relevant information. This information could be a website, an article link, a video, a song, a product listing, or another human.

At the end of the day, money too is an information network based system. It connects the right consumer to the right creator. So it’s only natural to expect that the technology of internet will be used as the backbone of consumer goods based economy.

The technology of the internet can be broadly categorized as indexing and recommendation engine. That’s how you discover amazon.com (indexing), search for an XL mouse pad(indexing), and end up buying the limited edition DBZ key caps (recommendation engine). That is how the manufacturers find the buyers for their products. And that forms the backbone of the internet economy. But we are not talking about this economy, this is actually good and has made everyone richer in last few decades. No, we are talking about the attention economy, where the human attention is the product.

Attention Economy

The name of the game is capturing eye balls, and never letting them go. Also known as engagement scores if you’re a PM.

Okay we need a contextual perspective on economy.

Economics is a science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.

- Lionel Robbins (1932)

Also, from the man who coined the term itself

In an information rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it

- Herb Simon (1971)

  • In traditional economic system, raw materials and processed goods are the scarce resources, and the economic units (families then, individuals now) pay for them.
  • In attention economy, information is abundant, attention is scarce. The economic units are the business entities paying to be seen and discovered.
  • The attention economy demands an infinite supply of creativity, and a great product team that can train the human attention to expect fresher and newer content while the eyeballs are glued to the screen.
  • So we got an age where the artists, musicians, content creators thrived in this system. Maybe not thrive, but atleast there was an economy structured primarily around creativity and expression.

The market of this attention economy are the social media platforms. According to Kevin Kelley, the product (which is the attention marketplace), has to deliver on these values, especially relevant now when the cost to create software is getting low.

  1. Immediacy - priority access, immediate delivery
  2. Personalization - tailored just for you
  3. Interpretation - support and guidance
  4. Authenticity - how can you be sure it is the real thing?
  5. Accessibility - wherever, whenever
  6. Embodiment - books, live music
  7. Patronage - “paying simply because it feels good”
  8. Findability - “When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention—and most of it free—being found is valuable.”

Great principles for product design. To capture the eye balls. To eventually serve a simple goal. Serving you the right Ads.

Meta Case Study: Ads

Let me break down Meta’s systems in a way that shows how effective this machinery is. So Meta made about $117 billion in 2023, and about 97.5% of that came from advertising. A company worth hundreds of billions basically runs on one revenue stream: ads. It harnesses attention by building the UI. This is the best, most efficient attention engineering operation in history. I love it to be honest.

There are three components to creating an attention market, or a consumer product, in today’s terms.

1. User understanding

Who is the user, what are their behaviors, what do they like seeing, and how to ensure they stick on the platform for as long as possible.

This is a combination of sophisticated technologies to make a user representation. It most likely user embeddings generated from feeding app interaction data over years to a deep neural network.

2. UI and the Recommendation System

UI and Recommendation System — together known as ‘the algorithm’ — go hand in hand. The UI design optimizes for the smoothest user action hooks (the scroll), and recsys optimizes the content to feed the user for those actions. They work in tandem. The recommendation system is designed to suck your attention, by giving bits of memetic reels, media from creators that share a similar vibe with you. It keeps you updated.

3. Ad Auction

With the above two in place, they have a working machinery to get the users hooked onto digital feeds. Now the businesses who want to be seen pay to get seen by the networks. And they employ an ad auction mechanism, with a system that their chief economist designed to be fair to all the bidders, and create happy user experiences. I tried understanding the VCG auction mechanism, and I get the fair for bidders part, I couldn’t understand how that’s responsible for happy user experiences, and this is not a diss, I really don’t understand it.

When an ad spot becomes available, Meta’s system considers:

  1. How much each advertiser is willing to pay
  2. The estimated action rate (likelihood you’ll click)
  3. Ad quality and relevance
  4. Your past behavior patterns

All this happens in milliseconds. Every time you scroll, these calculations are happening again and again.

Now to this we add our secret 4th ingredient, the chemical X that supercharges the shoggoth.

4. The Creators

They create the content that grabs your attention. Earlier it used to be artists with free expressions, now it is evolving to curated storytelling within 1 minute. Even practical helpful life and health coaches have to become a lot more than just what they are to stay relevant and be discovered by more audience. They serve as the little human brain nodes in the gigantic shoggoth.

Collectively this entity is much smarter than humans, and will outsmart every human unless they have superhuman levels of discipline. Everyone claims they have it, everyone is chronically online everyday. The shoggoth is powerful.

The creators (influencers, content makers) became part of the machine. The platforms’ algorithms started shaping content creation itself. Why? Because creators learned that certain types of content - content that triggered strong emotions, created controversy, or hit certain psychological triggers - got more engagement.

This structure creates a self-reinforcing system where:

  1. Users provide attention and data
  2. Platforms convert these into targeted advertising opportunities
  3. Advertisers pay for access to user attention
  4. Creators optimize for platform algorithms
  5. The cycle continues with increasingly sophisticated targeting

It’s beautiful from an engineering point of view, and every business person wants a piece. I wish my startup could acquire and retain users like this. It works really well, it can predict things about you that you don’t know, and it’s not really understanding anything, it’s just numbers and matching algorithms, and lots of actually relevant computer science.

Human Perspective

Okay, now please allow me a rant dear reader, let the human come out.

What the fuck guys, you’ve ruined the internet, and you’ve polluted everything that was beautiful about it. There is no joy in discovering new things, my attention span is fucked, I wake up in the morning from a mail, and 20 minutes later I am watching some random reel from mimetically similar creators, who have all run out of ideas trying to promote the same message.

And that’s how we got from hearty forum discussions of the yore to:

  • Outrage-baiting headlines
  • Increasingly extreme viewpoints
  • “Hot takes” designed to trigger responses
  • Content that hits dopamine triggers perfectly
  • Short-form video loops that keep you scrolling
  • Shitposters
  • Drama and controversy farming
  • Racism discourse and identity crises

Content Feels “Polluted” and Low-Value

What you’re experiencing is essentially a side effect of optimizing for “engagement at scale”:

  • Selection Bias: The algorithm surfaces what’s statistically likely to keep you on the platform, not necessarily what’s most useful or high-quality by your standards.
  • Engagement vs. Value Gap: The system doesn’t really understand “usefulness” or “quality” in a human sense. It only knows patterns correlated with engagement. Outrage, controversy, or mindless entertainment often perform well on these metrics.
  • Filter Bubbles and Repetition: Once a pattern of behavior is established, the system keeps feeding similar content, leading to repetitive or increasingly extreme content to hold your attention.

The tragedy? This system is incredibly efficient at what it does. It’s probably the most sophisticated attention-direction machine ever built. The same technology that can keep someone doom-scrolling for hours could theoretically be used to help people learn, grow, and connect meaningfully. But that’s not what drives revenue.

We can design a better system, the incentives have to be aligned toward using abundant information into discovering and serving human intention.

Intention Economy

The information is abundant, and attention is abundant too. And with GenAI there will be more creativity than ever seen before in human history. Tiktok will look like a quiet meditation retreat.

The modern scarcity in the doomscrolling stage is of meaning. With recommendation engines and smooth interfaces as addictive as crack, there is a dearth of meaningful engagement with the Internet and it’s various human nodes. This lack of meaning percolates in life, and few make it out with sheer willpower. Even those who make it out, would be better off in a world where they could use internet more meaningfully and drive their purpose forward.

So we have a scarce resource; meaning. And regardless of whether AGI comes or not, the economy will rewrite itself to fulfill the meaning crisis.

And we have the tools to capture meaning, with reason based systems. Intention is much easier to capture now by applying LLMs and designing for cognitive architectures that really understand the user psyche as a system of words, thoughts and ideas. This is a significant shift from the previous model where inadequate NLP techniques were used as a placeholder to capture user’s interests as embeddings. We don’t need any implicit assumptions, we can make it work with explicit expressions, and coherent construction of the psyche.

If we capture the intention, we can route information that adds meaning to it. And that software, that product will add value. The product will not be attention anymore. The product will be the beautiful software that is designed to add meaning in the lives of its users.

The economics align perfectly:

  • The scarce resource is meaningful digital experiences
  • Users trade their genuine intention, not just attention
  • Value creation comes from connecting people to opportunities that align with their goals
  • Networks form around shared purposes, not just shared content preferences

Imagine platforms optimizing for personal growth metrics instead of scroll depth. Recommendation engines trained on “did this help someone move towards their goals?” rather than “did they keep watching?” . The goal could be as simple as “have them relax in the evening”, to as bold as “have them be inspired through this economic downturn”. It’s not just a better user experience - it’s a more sustainable economic model. And the technology is growing, so we have to evolve the meta of what it means to integrate technology in our lives as well.

The technological pieces are all there:

  • LLMs that can parse complex human intentions
  • Semantic systems that can map goals to opportunities
  • Community tools that can create genuine connections
  • Metrics that can measure actual value creation

What’s missing isn’t the technology - it’s the will to build it. We need products that understand users as whole beings with aspirations, not just nodes in an attention network. And yes, this can be profitable - people are willing to pay for things that genuinely improve their lives. That’s a no brainer.

The attention economy gave us endless feeds. The meaning economy could give us endless possibility.