[News Terms] The Focus Is on ‘Money’... ‘Attention Economy’

Focus on the Scarcity of Human Attention
Capitalization of Interest through Algorithms
Raising Social and Ethical Issues such as Filter Bubbles

'Attention economy' is a theory and approach that regards human attention as a scarce resource and explains economic phenomena related to it. It is translated as 'attention economy,' 'interest economy,' or 'focus economy.' It was theorized by Herbert A. Simon, an American economist and psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978. He is famous as a pioneer of behavioral economics, which combines economics and psychology.

The Like economy, which refers to the economic influence of the 'Like' button, and the Aggro economy, which deliberately stirs controversy to attract people's attention through provocative thumbnails and content, also originated in a similar context to the attention economy.

Information consumes human attention. Various online platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram continuously produce information on a scale beyond human capacity. As information increases, the attention humans can allocate to individual pieces of information decreases. This is why human attention becomes a scarcer resource in the information society.

Companies competitively design online marketing strategies. They put great effort into keeping customers on their platforms. YouTube's video recommendation algorithm is a representative example. The exact criteria for how this system recommends videos have not been disclosed. However, it is known to be based on the relevance of the user's search terms, video performance, and other factors.

The results of the recommendation algorithm were outstanding. According to Mobile Index, a data analysis platform, YouTube ranked first in South Korea in July with a total usage time of 1.98 billion hours. It overwhelmingly outperformed other companies such as KakaoTalk (544.13 million hours) in second place and Naver (354.83 million hours) in third place. This also positively impacted advertising revenue and membership income embedded in videos. According to the American economic media CNBC's report in April, YouTube's advertising revenue in the first quarter of this year reached $8.09 billion (11.173 trillion KRW), a 21% increase compared to the same period last year. Capturing customers' attention became money for companies.

The photo is not related to any specific expression in the article. [Photo source=YouTube screen capture]

'Capitalization of attention' has caused many social and ethical issues. As platform users became accustomed to personalized content, the filter bubble emerged as an issue. A filter bubble refers to a platform providing only information filtered based on an individual's tastes and preferences to the customer. The problem of confirmation bias, which tends to ignore content that differs from one's own views, also became prominent alongside this. Such confirmation bias significantly influences the production and consumption of fake news.

Criticism has also been raised that platforms excessively focus on monetization competition while neglecting ethics. A research team from Harvard University's School of Public Health announced last year that six major social media platforms?Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter)?earned $11 billion (14.2 trillion KRW) in advertising revenue from users under 18 in 2022. In particular, YouTube generated the highest advertising revenue of $959.1 million (1.23 trillion KRW) from users aged 12 and under. The 'Dark pattern' of online shopping malls also emerged as a problem. Dark patterns refer to user interfaces designed to induce unnecessary spending by causing consumer confusion and inattention.