Subscriptions capture deeper sustained attention than the fragmented kind advertising harvests

Evidence

In business, there is always potential to gain something by zigging while everyone else is zagging. With everyone else—including its closest rival, Hulu, a joint venture of other media companies—reliant on advertising, Netflix could distinguish itself by offering a different kind of experience. But there was something more; in a sense, Netflix rediscovered a lost trove of human attention; not the splintered and fleeting kind being plundered by the web and cable TV, but deeper, sustained attention. It was a rich vein indeed, filled with an evident hunger for more engaging, immersive content. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1098

Categorization

• XREF: This distinction between splintered and sustained attention parallels themes from the reader’s silence/Deep Listening work and One Square Inch of Silence. — connects to: Mass-media profits derive from non-reciprocal attention exchange — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 251; Riding current viral trends in real time sustains audience anticipation; Ad-supported media sell audiences’ attention, not content, to advertisers — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist…, 219 (+4 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The idea that there are qualitatively different kinds of attention—one plundered, one sustained—and that a subscription model re-opened an abandoned vein of it, is a paradigm-level distinction worth sitting with.

Broader Connections

• Ad-supported media sell audiences’ attention, not content, to advertisers #complicates (0.80) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 219
• Viral attention mobilized by the internet evaporates as quickly as it arises #complicates (0.72)