How much are your eyeballs worth online?
How valuable is your time? And how much of that time do you waste reading email from people that you don't really want to talk to? Would you like to be paid for it? A service called Attention Auction could enable you to do just that.
I signed up for an account -- I'm not an Internet rock star, I just wanted to test this out -- and it asked me what my price would be for reading a message. I set it at a dollar. Now, it lets me refer interested parties to my Attention Auction webpage (which I suspect will remain depressingly empty). Anyone interested in sending me a message can bid whatever they are willing to pay for me to read it. Bids I receive are then listed according to value, and I can pick and choose which ones I want to accept. The payments then drop into my account, but the operator of the service takes 50%.
Even though I get lots of press releases every day from public relations people trying to get their clients into the papers, I don't think I'd use this professionally. It seems unethical for a journalist to do that. I'm also not sure that companies trying to sell me timeshares and supermarket loyalty cards on a personal level would be willing to go through the rigmarole of making this work without some form of automation.
But it does raise an interesting notion, which is that attention is a currency online in its own right these days. But Attention isn't the only currency. The value of attention is a function of the reader's importance to the sender. I know my place. From a professional standpoint, people are likely to pay much more to reach, say, the editor of the New York Times than they are to a lowly tech blogger.
But the importance of the reader is a more complex parameter than you might at first imagine. Because we all wear multiple hats in different communities, our social value becomes very difficult to quantify. A school kid might carry little social or monetary value for a bank trying to sell mortgages, for example. However, that kid might be a leading authority in her social circle when it comes to the latest music. Record labels might therefore find her a very interesting target indeed when it comes to communicating new product.
Sites like Attention Auction are the first, nascent step toward a much more sophisticated approach to social capital that will eventually encompass social networks in a way that we can barely imagine today. The people behind this service missed a trick by not integrating it somehow with Facebook, which is the battleground for an awful lot of attention these days. Don't look at this site for the kind of sophisticated attention exchange that we can expect to see in the future. Nevertheless, this development has to happen, because as an increasing number of individuals and organisations compete for our dwindling attention, the market dynamic demands it. The attention economy might not be here just yet, but it's coming, believe me.
Danny Bradbury, MSN Tech & Gadgets
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Posted by: Lissa Robinson | Mar 31, 2010 12:37:55 PM
Hey Danny, cool article. Not sure I would ever pay anyone to read my emails, but hey, you never know. Stranger things have happened.
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