Attention can be monetized either by charging admission or by reselling it.

Evidence

It is a fascinating moment to contemplate. Tech’s hottest firm stood at a fork in the road, pondering its future and, being an unusually deliberative company, tried to think through the consequences of each choice. Thanks to the growth of search, Google was capturing bushels of attention, but how to capitalize on that? As we’ve seen, there have always been two ways of converting attention into cash. The older is to charge admission, as to the spectacle, on the model of the opera or HBO or a book; for Google this would mean licensing or selling access to a premium product. The second is to resell the attention gained, that being the model of the attention merchant. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 871

Categorization

• DEFINE: Codifies the fundamental two-model framework of the attention economy that recurs across the whole book.
• XREF: Pays off the opera/HBO/book model threads from earlier chapters on spectacle-era commerce. — connects to: Compulsory education makes students a captive audience whose attention can be monetized — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 9; Attention merchants profit by colonizing previously uncommercialized spaces of awareness. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 17; Attention can be quantitatively measured and thereby bought and sold. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 121 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Attention can be quantitatively measured and thereby bought and sold. #expands (0.90) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 121
• Advertising industrialized attention by converting it into a resellable commodity #expands (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 24
• Platform profits come from harvesting user attention and selling it back to advertisers #exemplifies (0.85) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 43
• Measuring attention as data enables treating it as a monetizable resource #expands (0.80)
• Attention functions as convertible capital that individuals and institutions can bank and trade #expands (0.80) — Michael H. Goldhaber, The Attention Economy and the Net, 14