What is an Attention Graph?

We live in the attention economy. Your boss, your significant other, a new social network, your favorite website and every large media company are all competing to hold your attention. Those who can measure the intensity of your attention are at a distinct advantage—they can calibrate their messages to keep you engaged.

As Joe Marchese eloquently puts it in Media Future, intensity and duration can be used to quantify attention:

Humans make a choice in every moment where to direct their attention. And, like energy, it can be directed in different levels of intensity and duration. And when those levels of collective attention energy are strong, it has the potential to shape something?—?human minds, and therefore human actions. Because even after attention moves on, if the subject was intense enough, or lasted long enough, the attention can be turned into a thought, a feeling, a memory?—?an impression.

In visual form this looks like an attention graph, which maps out the intensity and duration of attention paid to anything. A typical graph would show that over time the intensity drops enough that you become distracted and switch focus to something else.

For example: a visit to a website starts at a certain intensity?—?a measure of how engaged someone is?—?a product of the reader’s mood, their affinity towards the property, and a host of other factors. Over time good content will increase intensity, and bad content will reduce it. User experience also has a big impact on intensity; easy to consume content?—?be it editorial or advertising?—?will have a positive impact.

Some publishers, like Buzzfeed and UpWorthy, are building technology to measure attention. Facebook uses time on screen as a quality metric for stories and ads. At Parsec, we’re pricing media on a measure of how much attention is paid to ads. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to leveraging the attention graph to create more efficient experiences.

Theoretically, for a publisher to maximize attention, it would maintain consistent levels of intensity over time in its readers, showing a mix of advertising and content in such a fashion that they are never bored or annoyed enough to bounce. Think of it as a personalized advertising experience based on how you engage with content?—?sort of like a conversation with someone who never gets too annoying or boring.