Individual attention is low-grade ore needing massive aggregation to be profitably mined

Evidence

The analogy is perfect: The money-value of our attention is “low grade,” in the sense that, in aggregate, you can certainly cash it in, but you need a lot of human eyeballs to make any profit in the advertising industry. And salable eyeball attention isn’t that easy to get, either. Homo sapiens have been going about their business being interested in the world and each other for about two hundred thousand years. Getting them all to look at ten square inches of backlit glass for eight or nine hours a day isn’t that easy. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 95

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains why ‘low grade’ applies: attention must be aggregated at population scale to be profitable.