An Incredible Article, prescient in ways which the author doesn’t begin to dig….

Twitter as Flashpoint for the Attention Economy

Written by Andrew Keen

3/19/2009 45 comments

As I was sitting down to type a response to this article, Nick, my son phoned me from his cell phone in London to ask me if I was going to watch Ireland attempt to win their first 6 nations Grand Slam in rugby since 1948. I remember that well, listening to it on the radio with my Dad, and being entranced at the magic of John O’Meara and Jackie Kyle, the scrum half and fly half respectively. Nick told me he’d just heard Jackie Kyle on the radio, saying that unlike these times, the players in those days didn’t drink alcohol, and instead, when the match was over, they went round to someone’s house for a cup of tea.

I can hear you thinking, what has any of this got to do with the issue at hand, attention replacing money in the Twitter economy? Pretty much everything, for we are essentially the products of where we put our attention.

I remember teaching crack dealers on remand in Riker’s Island prison to meditate back in the late 1990s and in order to get their attention, asking them what was the difference between me and them? There were many differences in fact, e.g. I am white (more accurately a not very desirable shade of pink – my Irish genes), none of them were. I could go on. But when they offered some possibilities, I’d concede, to get them onside, and then say something like, “the main difference is where you chose to put your attention, and where I chose to put mine. Everything follows on from that, and another difference, for example, is that I get to go home tonight and you don’t.”

It’s hard to argue against the truth of this, and it came across as non judgmental, I was saying they were bad people or anything like that, or condemning them, and they would then mostly give me their attention for half an hour or so, which was all I needed.

We teach young children all sorts of things, reading, writing, playing a musical instrument (if they are lucky). I believe that within ten years we will be teaching meditation as a basic part of the education of young people, for learning to control the attention, to focus the attention and keep it there, is a critical faculty in growing up to be a successful human being. Meditation teaches how to do this, and more importantly, by going inwards, it helps each individual make good choices regarding where to put that attention.

On his death bed, John Jacob Astor, the billionaire, was asked if had any regrets. He apparently said he wished he’d put all his money into Manhattan real estate. An extraordinary answer, giving he was about to leave it all behind and could take with him as much as a red cent. My guess is, if he’d been taught to meditate when he was a kid, he’d have given a different answer on his deathbed, and indeed, he might well have prioritized his life differently too.

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The next big thing has finally arrived: Twitter’s ascent marks the end of the Web 2.0 period (1999-2009) and the beginning of what I would call, without any originality, the “attention economy.”

The term “attention economy” was invented by the futurist Michael Goldhaber, who wrote a remarkably prescient piece in December 1997 in which he described a new arrangement in which the “flow of attention” replaced money as the currency of the Internet.

Twitter Inc. — with its medieval-like armies of followers and followed — is a good example of how this new attention economy works. The value to us of Twitter is based on how many followers we have and thus how many people read our words. We all compete on Twitter for both attention and followers, of course, because time is finite, and there is only a certain number of people we can realistically follow and only a certain number of messages we have the bandwidth to read.

While Goldhaber was right to focus on the flow of attention, he was wrong to argue that it would replace money as the currency of the Internet. Let me explain using the Twitter example. The micro-blogging network now has 8 million users actively sending and receiving short messages. But these users aren’t customers, because the service is absolutely free of charge. As a pioneer of the attention economy, Twitter now is faced with the challenge of monetizing attention. For it to become a viable business, the VC-backed startup — which only just appointed a sales and business development team — needs to identify what it is, exactly, the company is selling.

In the Web 2.0 period between 1999 and 2009, the dominant business model was advertising. So Internet businesses like Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), MySpace , Facebook , and YouTube Inc. all gave away their technology for free and then sold advertising alongside all their user-generated-content. If, however, as I suspect, Twitter represents the next big thing, then its business model is going to be radically different from the advertising-centric model of the Web 2.0 period.

Serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis accidently-on-purpose revealed Twitter’s radically new business model a couple of weeks ago. With his 62,000+ fans, Calacanis is a classic example of a power Twitter user — a digital feudal knight who has won the attention of a huge army of loyal followers. As the CEO of Mahalo.com Inc. and founder of TechCrunch 50, Calacanis uses Twitter to build his personal network and brand. The service offers such significant value to Calacanis that this always-on, globetrotting entrepreneur has taken the time to personally make 6,812 updates of his own.

Earlier this month, Calacanis expressed his ire at the powers-that-be at Twitter because they left him off their suggested users list — a group of 20 A-list names given to all new Twitter users. Making a public offer of $250,000 to be included on the list for two years, Calacanis presented Twitter with a highly viable business model for the new attention economy. What he was doing, of course, was quantifying the value of attention. Calacanis was telling Twitter that an exclusive position on the network had an annual value to him of $125,000.

For most of Twitter’s 8 million hoi-polloi like you and me — with our pitiful handful of followers — the real-time network has no monetary value. But for Twitter’s power-players, new digital aristocrats like the English actor Stephen Fry (over 320,000 followers), the bicyclist Lance Armstrong (320,000 followers), or the pop diva Britney Spears (448,000 followers), this is a significantly valuable marketing platform that provides them with a captive audience to promote and sell their ideas and products.

The Twitter community is growing fast. By this time next year, its 8 million members will have exploded to between 25 and 50 million, and the attention economy will have truly arrived. Imagine Twitter creating a two-tiered system in which its 100 leading celebrities paid $500,000 a year for the privilege of appearing above the fold on the sign-in page for new users. Then imagine that all power users with more than 10,000 followers had to pay Twitter an annual maintenance fee of $1,000 (a veritable bargain at less than 10 cents per follower per year). Now wouldn’t that be a radically more innovative business model than trying to sell advertisements and sponsorships?

— Andrew Keen, Silicon Valley author, broadcaster, and entrepreneur, can be reached on Twitter at @ajkeen.

As I was sitting down to type a response to this article, Nick, my son phoned me from his cell phone in London to ask me if I was going to watch Ireland attempt to win their first 6 nations Grand Slam in rugby since 1948. I remember that well, listening to it on the radio with my Dad, and being entranced at the magic of John O’Meara and Jackie Kyle, the scrum half and fly half respectively. Nick told me he’d just heard Jackie Kyle on the radio, saying that unlike these times, the players in those days didn’t drink alcohol, and instead, when the match was over, they went round to someone’s house for a cup of tea.

I can hear you thinking, what has any of this got to do with the issue at hand, attention replacing money in the Twitter economy? Pretty much everything, for we are essentially the products of where we put our attention.

I remember teaching crack dealers on remand in Riker’s Island prison to meditate back in the late 1990s and in order to get their attention, asking them what was the difference between me and them? There were many differences in fact, e.g. I am white (more accurately a not very desirable shade of pink – my Irish genes), none of them were. I could go on. But when they offered some possibilities, I’d concede, to get them onside, and then say something like, “the main difference is where you chose to put your attention, and where I chose to put mine. Everything follows on from that, and another difference, for example, is that I get to go home tonight and you don’t.”

It’s hard to argue against the truth of this, and it came across as non judgmental, I was saying they were bad people or anything like that, or condemning them, and they would then mostly give me their attention for half an hour or so, which was all I needed.

We teach young children all sorts of things, reading, writing, playing a musical instrument (if they are lucky). I believe that within ten years we will be teaching meditation as a basic part of the education of young people, for learning to control the attention, to focus the attention and keep it there, is a critical faculty in growing up to be a successful human being. Meditation teaches how to do this, and more importantly, by going inwards, it helps each individual make good choices regarding where to put that attention.

On his death bed, John Jacob Astor, the billionaire, was asked if had any regrets. He apparently said he wished he’d put all his money into Manhattan real estate. An extraordinary answer, giving he was about to leave it all behind and could take with him as much as a red cent. My guess is, if he’d been taught to meditate when he was a kid, he’d have given a different answer on his deathbed, and indeed, he might well have prioritized his life differently too.