Who’s Winning the Eyeballs War?

Welcome to the Attention Era!

“GameChanger is more valuable than our Netflix subscription.”?

That’s what a customer told me recently. A grandmother of two teens in baseball, her kind words got me thinking. She valued my?company ’s app—which connected her with her grandkids—more than her streaming platform.?

This made her happy.?

Besides being about the best compliment we could hope to receive, her words have societal implications. To understand them, let’s travel back in time. All the way to 1878. This is the year Leo Tolstoy published?Anna Karenina .

Alongside?War and Peace, this novel is considered Tolstoy’s masterpiece. It’s still widely beloved, recently clinching a coveted spot in?Oprah’s Book Club .?

It also clocks in at?864 pages .?

That requires a lot of bandwidth. A lot of attention. Even if Tolstoy’s novel is as great as critics say (and it is!), it’s unlikely the average person will devote hours and hours of their free time to read it.

And that’s not just because the typical American reads just?12 books a year . It’s because we’re drowning in competing content: streaming videos, social posts, movies, TV, other books, video games, not to mention, real life.

Back when Tolstoy penned?Anna Karenina, the public didn’t enjoy so many options. Someone reading this book in the 19th century by candlelight might happily linger over pages and pages of dense prose.?

These days??

It’s harder to command such attention from anyone. That’s mainly due to modern media consumption options and habits. Nobel Laureate?Herbert A. Simon ?observed this back in the 20th century, coining the phrase,?The Attention Economy. “He also noted that ‘a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention,’”?according to the?Berkeley Economic Review .

Truer words were never spoken. As the?Nielson Norman Group ?explains:

Attention is one of the most valuable resources of the digital age. For most of human history, access to information was limited. Centuries ago, many people could not read, and education was a luxury. Today, we have access to information on a massive scale. Facts, literature, and art are available (often for free) to anyone with an internet connection.

We are presented with a wealth of information, but we have the same amount of mental processing power as we have always had. The number of minutes has also stayed exactly the same in every day. Today attention, not information, is the limiting factor.

You may recall how historian?Thomas Carlyle ?dubbed Economics: “the dismal science .” That’s because it often deals with a scarcity of resources—food, money, materials, and now…?attention.?

Nearly 150 years after?Anna Karenina’s?publishing we are awash in things to watch, things to read, things to listen to, things to experience. Our challenge? Scarcity. Finding enough hours in the day to consume it all. The challenge for content producers? Getting enough eyeballs on your material.

There’s yet another way to contemplate our zeitgeist. Just a few decades ago, consumable content fell into fairly distinct categories. Literary houses published books. Studios turned out films. Record labels produced albums.

Then corporate leviathans like Amazon and Apple leapt into the fray, blowing up legacy business models. Suddenly, the former wasn’t just selling books at?sub-publisher prices . It was generating?video content , plus enabling authors to?self-publish their books , and now making a?big foray ?into sports. Likewise, Apple didn’t just make phones capable of?hosting music it licensed , it got into the content game with?AppleTV .?

If you think about it, the Apples and Amazons of the world are only the most?visible?attention purveyors. Nowadays, we are all in the attention business—even if we don’t enjoy such stratosphere revenues.?

Returning to the comment from the nice Grandma, she was onto something profound. In the 21st century, a war rages for attention. Unlike in the past, little to no division exists between creators or their categories.?

This means unlike Tolstoy; today’s novelists aren’t just competing against other novelists for mindshare. They’re going up against Twitch, Netflix, TikTok, YouTube, the Super Bowl, and more. After all, any prospective reader could opt to stream endless Insta stories instead of picking up their book.?

Now, some might decry this situation.?

They could point to?diminishing attention spans ?and?falling literacy rates ?as cultural decay markers. But what if it instead heralds a Renaissance 2.0.? I tend to believe we are in fact, on the cusp of another explosion of human creativity.?

One big way our era differs from the first iteration is?democratization. The public tends to recall only marquee artists from this period—Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Hieronymus Bosch. Nowadays, the technology exists for?anyone?with a phone and a WIFI to produce the next big cultural artifact.

Such abilities arise from the industrial leaps and bounds we’ve made in recent centuries. Returning to Tolstoy’s time, most people’s main occupation was subsistence. Their attention was focused on staying warm. Feeding their families.?

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs assesses the things humans desire at various developmental stages. Consulting this?pyramid , it’s clear our ancestors???couldn’t enjoy our same perks. That’s because only a few generations back humankind’s consuming preoccupation was physiological: food, shelter, sleep, clothing, etc.?

But welcome to the Attention Era.?Though inequality still persists across the globe, billions are now free to?self-actualize, the goal of Maslow’s final stage. In short, we are free to become the highest version of ourselves.

This is the insight I came to when I considered that grandma’s words. She helped me to see the world’s engaged in a winner-take-all cage match for eyeballs. And that’s a good thing.?

It means since time is our most valuable commodity, today’s content producers must work harder for our attention. A survival of the fittest matchup, it promises to only get more intense—and more interesting—as humans start to?experience?content; for instance, in the?metaverse .

?This all leads to two key questions. For content creators: why should I give you my attention? For the public: Where will you spend your time?

Speaking of attention, thank you for reading my first Substack. If you like what you just read, please?subscribe ?for more content. We write about how technology is transforming how we create and consume movies, videos, TV, games, sports, and social media.