Attention Blog

Chris Anderson lit things up in the blogosphere a couple of days ago with his vision of a zero-dollar future. He wrote about it in his Wired cover story: Free! 

Alex Iskold put forward some cautionary thoughts in his Beware! post.

I have to say that I think there’s a lot more sense in what Chris is focused on than those who would line up with Alex and say “stop the madness”. The reason that I think the Wired piece is based on some really sound thinking is:

1. It closely mimics reality. You can see it happening, so there has to be some significant fundamental truth to it.

2. The basic value proposition and underlying business models for entire industries are undergoing massive disruption because of the internet. It’s silly to think that the internet itself is not subject to tectonic shifts in the source of value and the mechanisms used to capture it.

3. These shifts are so fundamental that anyone in business needs to be concerned with understanding them, because increasingly, the internet is your business.

The first point put up there - “it’s happening so it has to be true” is almost one of the funniest bits about the position of the naysayers. Whether you WANT it to be true has almost nothing to do with whether it is in fact true. It reminds me a bit of a really long but engaging tragedy I read recently about a super-powerful, well-connected and wealthy dude named Doug Morris. Doug is the head of Universal Music. He used to rule the world. He doesn’t understand why things have changed, and he wants the world to fit his understanding. He’s clever enough to fight things out and be a general nuisance to people who are innovating and making money doing it, but you get the sense reading the saga that he’s doomed to fail because he’s playing the moral equivalent of a really strong poker hand at a blackjack table. My point? Don’t let this be you. Better to look at the world in a way that you can’t quite grasp than to say “no, I don’t like that” and just ignore it.

Point two, that the internet/technology/software industry is not immune to the massive shifts taking place in how value is created should be obvious. In many ways the internet is the source of most of the commotion. There is a huge expectation of things on the internet being free, which has been the case since it first began. The question of “how can you compete with free?” is not new. It’s probably time to get used to answering it correctly.

All I can say about number three is when these guys are doing business online, it’s gotta be something pretty pervasive. I recall having a conversation with a car dealer sometime in 1999 about the deal he was trying to make, and I mentioned something about the things I found out on the internet. His response was “well, the internet can’t sell you a car”. I would expect that he has probably modified that view a bit by now.

The careful reader, at this point, may be wondering what any of this has to do with attention. I think we can expand on this quite a bit in the future, but I would like to use a simple proof point to tie it all together. The existence of ReadWriteWeb, and Alex’s job writing for them, is based in large part on the economics of attention. If nobody cared what they said, and nobody read what they wrote, there would be no RWW. It is not because I pay for their product that they have a thriving and valuable enterprise. It’s because I pay with my attention.