What’s the most valuable thing to you? I’ll give you a hint: If you’ve read this far, I’ve taken 3 units of it from you. It’s your time. If time is the most valuable thing we have and our attention is the currency by which we spend that time, then our attention is the most valuable type of money we have.

Today, I’m going to talk about the human attention economy, the value of human attention and how crypto allows people to monetize their attention.

The Value of Human Attention

To understand how important human attention is, consider the 5 most valuable tech companies in the world: FAAMG. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Microsoft.

Or as I like to call it now, MAMAA: Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet.

Three out of five of these companies have a very simple business model: they make stuff, we buy their stuff, they make money. However, Facebook and Google have very different user bases. Despite having the largest user bases, 30% of the world’s population use their products. Over 99.5% of their users, use their products for free.

For example, in 2020, Youtube did $20 billion in revenue, had 2.3 billion users (30% of the world population!) but only 30 million Youtube Premium subscribers. In other words, they made $20 billion despite only monetizing 0.15% of their audience. 

How is it possible that a company can do $20 billion in revenue yet 99.85% of their users don’t pay to use it? It’s because they are what Tim Wu calls Attention Merchants (my book notes). They buy and sell human attention.

Attention Merchants: The Profitability of Buying and Selling Human Attention

I define attention merchants as people who are in the business of buying and selling human attention.

Unlike, what people think that they sell our data. Not only do they not sell our data as is commonly believed, selling our data would ruin their business model, and it’s not even that profitable anyway. They sell something much more valuable. They sell our attention.

How the Attention Economy Works

The attention economy works essentially like this. You have an attention buyer, let’s say, Nike. Nike goes to Youtube (attention merchant) and says, I want to buy 3 seconds of attention for 25,000 people (attention supply) between the ages of 15-25 that are interested in Lebron James and listen to hip hop music. Youtube then says sure, that will be $1,000, please. Nike gives Youtube, $1,000, Youtube gives Nike 3 seconds of the attention of 25,000 people and those people get to watch all the videos they want on Youtube for free.

This is actually a pretty good business model. It allows businesses to reach their target customers and allows people to use these services for free. But the fact remains that these companies are making a lot of money from our attention and we’re not seeing any of the financial upsides. What if there was a way to share some of this upside with us? Crypto fixes this.

3 Models for Monetizing Human Attention

People say crypto has turned the internet into investment banking. So if crypto monetizes everything and human attention is the most important type of money we have. What if we monetized human attention?

See also: Tokens in the Attention Economy

Brave: Crypto’s Favorite Attention Merchant

Brave is a web browser just like Google Chrome or Safari, the key difference is that you can opt-in to get ads on Brave and if you see an ad, you get paid for it. They pay you using their own token called the Basic Attention Token which you can freely trade just like any other type of money or send as a tip to your favourite content creators.

I think Brave’s thesis is very powerful for a couple of reasons.

The Web Browser is the iPhone of Crypto

People keep saying that crypto doesn’t have a killer app. I believe that the killer app for crypto is a web browser. Unlike other types of platforms like mobile apps or smartphones that are controlled by gatekeepers, the web browser is something that every single person on the internet uses, whether or not you’re interested in cryptocurrencies, and it’s the only platform that’s not controlled by a single entity. This means that the addressable market for this attention economy is huge.

So even if you’re not into crypto. If you browse the internet and you want privacy or just don’t want to see annoying ads. Brave is a good browser by itself without the crypto part. I think this is important because many people don’t have a use case for crypto but a web browser is a beginner-friendly way to get people onboarded to crypto without changing existing behaviours.

Basic Attention Token (BAT) has Strong Utility

 Basic Attention Token is one of the very few cryptocurrencies that doesn’t solely rely on new buyers to bid up the price, it actually has inherent demand. As long as there are companies that want to buy the attention of potential customers and there’s attention on the Brave Browser, then there will always be a natural buyer for BAT.

It’s important to note that it’s not going to be life-changing money we’re talking about here. People are making around $5-10 a month. But because you’re not going out of your way to make this money, it’s pretty cool passive income that you’re getting for browsing the internet and getting some ads. Things which you’re already doing for free now anyway. Like I say, don’t underestimate the things people will do for an additional $5 or $10.

A really cool feature offered by brave is the ability to tip your favourite content creators in BAT. The amount of BAT you make in a month likely won’t be enough to spend on any meaningful expenses, but it’s just enough that you can redirect it towards a content creator you really like and you can support them without having to alter your behaviour too much. It’s almost like you’re redirecting the ads that you didn’t want taking your attention towards the content creators to whom you actually enjoy giving your attention.

Paying to Send People Email

Another way our attention gets taken from us is through email. From downright spam to annoying email newsletters that we forget why we even subscribed to, email is the pernicious attention snatcher. The reason why this problem is so prolific is that the cost of sending emails is so low that people don’t really have an incentive to make sure that the email they’re sending us is worth our attention.

There was a company called 21.co that had the idea that if you want to send someone an email you had to pay them first. Even if the cost to send someone an email was $0.10, it introduces just enough of a cost that if I’m going to send someone an email, I’m only going to do it if it’s worth $0.10 of my money. This would ensure a higher quality of emails being sent before taking someone’s attention.

Directly to Consumer Attention Buying with Airdrops

Another way companies in crypto get people’s attention is by sending them free money. 

There’s an NFT marketplace called LooksRare which is an OpenSea competitor and when they launched, they had a very interesting strategy for getting people’s attention. They essentially sent free money in the form of LOOKS tokens to everyone that had bought an NFT on Opensea in the past. This is a complete game-changer in the market of how we get human attention.

The closest equivalent we have to that currently is if things like when Coinbase gave $10 to everyone who scanned their QR code during the SuperBowl.

But there are a couple of problems with that model. First, it’s permissioned, so you need to either pay a middleman in the form of a TV network, Google or Facebook to run the ads to reach your audience. The next problem is that this audience may not even be your target audience. While Google and Facebook ads can be very targeted, it’s still pretty hard to precisely target people based on purchase history. Finally, there’s usually some amount of friction required before they can use the incentive.

With crypto airdrops, it can be done in a completely permissionless, targeted and frictionless way. To put into context what this would look like in the physical world. Imagine if there was a new coffee shop called CoffeePlus that opened near your house. Imagine if when they launched they automatically sent a free $10 CoffePlus gift card to everyone who had bought a coffee at the neighbourhood Starbucks in the last year.

The ability to directly pay for the attention of the exact people you want to reach is going to have big implications for how companies acquire attention and how users allocate their attention. Thinking back to the article I mentioned earlier about how crypto is turning the internet into investment banking. I think that’s a very narrow way of looking at it. I think what crypto really does is arrange the internet into having better-aligned incentives.

Action Items

Here are some tangible action items if you found this stuff interesting.

  1. Download and use the Brave Browser. It’s actually a pretty cool browser and most of their users genuinely love it. Even if you don’t use any of the crypto creatures, it’s a good browser just by itself. Using the Brave Browser is also a good way to get a sneak peek into what I believe the future of the web will look like.

     
  2. Buy some Basic Attention Token. This is actually not financial advice and I own a small amount of BAT myself so I’m biased. But I think that the best way to incentivize yourself to learn about something is to get some skin in the game. Buy a very small amount, don’t think of it as you’re buying an investment, think of it as you’re buying a course to learn about crypto and assume it will go to zero. Treat it as an education expense.

     
  3. Perform an attention audit. This presentation was ostensibly about crypto. But really it was about human attention. I think our time and attention is the most valuable thing we have. As human attention becomes scarcer, the battle for it will become more intense and it’s important that we’re all very intentional about where we spend our time.

Conclusion

In the words of Benjamin Franklin, “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.”

Thank you for your time and attention. I hope it was worth it.