The Cult of the Attention Web: How the Free Internet Is Eating Itself

On the web, time is money. JL

Jesse Weaver comments in Medium:

The finite nature of time means that, in the attention web, everything is in competition with everything else. Facebook is as much in competition with Twitter, as it is with Apple Music, Amazon and Walmart, Xbox, Chipotle and your family dinner table. Time spent shopping, eating, talking, playing, or sleeping is time that you are not looking at ads. It’s why Facebook has experimented with in-feed shopping. They have to compete on all fronts to win the attention war. If they could serve up your meals they would.

I’m disappointed about Instagram’s most recent announcement. They’ll be shifting their photo feed from a chronological list to an algorithmically driven one, ordered based on which posts they think you will like most. My disappointment is not based in nostalgia or a lament of change. I’m disappointed because the decision is a symptom of a larger problem that is eating the web.

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Over the past few decades a significant portion of the economy has shifted. Once upon a time companies and services were geared toward enticing you out of your money. Today, the goal of many is to entice you out of your time. Which, in turn, is leveraged as collateral to attract money from advertisers.

Our current version of the internet lives and breaths off a currency of human attention. With the success and failure of many internet companies predicated on how much of a person’s time they can capture.

This model has reshaped much of the internet into an “attention web”, with companies fighting tooth and nail to own every possible moment of your time.

As laid out in a recent New York Times piece about the Instagram change:

“These companies want to always, always give you the next best thing to look at,” said Brian Blau, a vice president at Gartner, an industry research firm. “If an algorithm can give you much more engaging content more frequently, you’ll stick around longer.”

The more time people spend using Instagram, the more often the company is able to serve people ads.

It’s the Faustian bargain we’ve all struck. In exchange for a “free” web, we give you our time. Unfortunately, this structure is unsustainable and is compromising both our experience of the web and the quality of the things we consume.

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Time is more precious than money. Money is a renewable resource. Everyone always has the potential to make more money. Time, on the other hand, is finite. There are only so many hours in a day. By definition, you only have so much time to give.

The finite nature of time means that, in the world of the attention web, the competitive landscape is all encompassing. Everything is in competition with everything else. Facebook is as much in competition with Twitter, as it is with Spotify and Apple Music, Gawker and BuzzFeed, Hulu and YouTube, Candy Crush and Four Dots, Amazon and Walmart, Xbox and Playstation, Chipotle and your family dinner table, your hobbies and your bed. Because in the attention web, time spent shopping, eating, talking, playing, or sleeping is time that you are not looking at ads. It’s why Facebook has experimented with in-feed shopping. It’s why they bought a messaging app and VR company. It’s behind their big drive into video, as well as article self-publishing. They have to compete on all fronts to win the attention war. If they could serve up your meals they would.

Coca-cola talks about trying to win “share of stomach”, acknowledging that they are not just in competition with the other players in the drink industry, but in competition with every other food company and restaurant for the finite resource of stomach real estate. The attention web has taken this concept to a new scale that pits a vast array of industries against each other. This broad, unending competition for people’s time takes it’s toll on even the most popular services. See Twitter, Yahoo, Zynga and others.

As with all finite resources, there is a physical cap to how much time can be mined from the world, with population size as the forcing function. The number of people on the internet is directly proportional to the amount of time available. If you assume that technology companies want to maintain their growth curves, there are three possible avenues for them to take against this constraint:

Grow the size of the population with internet access.

Free up more time for the people who already have internet access.

Or create more people.

While no tech company is currently trying to create more people (except maybe Tinder) the other two paths have already started to manifest. Major players are trying to expand global internet access. Facebook’s internet.org initiative is geared toward bringing free internet access to populations without it, and Google’s Project Loon is designed to create a balloon-based network delivering reliable internet to isolated rural areas.

Google is also one of the best examples of a company taking the second avenue: free up more time for people who already have internet. Their push into self driving car technology has a lot of potential benefits for humanity, but it also does something fundamental for Google and their business model. Time spent in the car is a vast untapped reserve of human attention. If your daily commute isn’t filled with trivial things like watching the road and trying not to kill people you suddenly have a lot more time to search — and be served search ads. Building a self driving car may seem like extreme measures just to free up people’s time, but it’s really just the tech equivalent of fracking — Oil’s extreme attempt to unlock untapped reserves.

At some point though, the reserves run out, and as more and more competitors (from almost every industry) come onto the scene, all vying for their slice of the time pie, simply expanding internet access and freeing up time isn’t enough. You still have to win people’s attention.

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Ostensibly the drive to capture share of attention should be a big win for consumers. It’s often positioned that way. As in Instagram’s characterization of their timeline change as a step “to improve your experience”. And, based on the principles of human-centered design, companies should be striving for the best possible user experience and highest quality content in order to win the hearts, minds and, ultimately, the time of would be users. But, often the attention web takes a different direction.

Instead of streamlined experiences, filled with quality content, we’ve seen the rise of clickbait headlines, listicles and ad saturated UIs that are slow, cumbersome and sometimes down right unusable, especially on mobile screens.

In the attention web we end up with feeds that look like this:

And then we click through to a mess like this — with auto-playing video ads and inline ads that suddenly appear mid-scroll.