You’re reading the My News Biz newsletter, which I will be sending you every other Thursday. My goal is to help you and other digital media entrepreneurs to find a viable business model that works for you. If you were forwarded this email, you can sign up here. Why your time is the most valuable commodity on EarthWe live in an economy where everyone is fighting to monetize your attention
You’re reading the Your News Biz newsletter. My goal is to help digital media entrepreneurs and small businesses find viable business models.
Every buzz, ping, and headline is a bid to capture your most valuable resource — attention. There are new economic forces at work. For many people, this endless barrage of shouters and seducers is causing them to turn off their notifications, block websites, pay for call screeners, and avoid the news. It’s because we’re living in a new economy, the attention economy, where the most valuable commodity in the world is not oil or lithium or rare-earth minerals. Your time and attention are the prize—and every publisher, politician, and algorithm are in the race to grab them In this issue of Your News Biz, I’ll explore how creators and consumers are navigating this noisy landscape: — How your time and attention are being monetized — How consumers, not editors, are deciding on content — Why AI can be an ally, not an enemy, of media creators — Final thought on monopolies Scarcity, not abundanceTwo decades ago, you were hearing about “the information economy”. That was the idea that information and data were more valuable than gold. The internet was “an information superhighway.” Information was now infinitely abundant, timely, and freely available everywhere. But the attention economy is one of scarcity, not abundance. You have only 24 hours in a day, and how you spend them affects every imaginable business in every imaginable way. You can’t create more time. In the last four or five years, as media companies lost audience and revenue, they began to ask consumers, why are you leaving? Listen firstThe answer came at the media industry conferences I attended. Many of the success stories described how organizations focused on covering topics audiences care about, not what editors care about. They paid attention to what was happening in their communities, not what was going on in New York, Washington, or Los Angeles. The watchwords have become: Listen, don’t talk down to them; listen, don’t preach to them; listen, create community for them. This formula has started to work, as I have reported, in Ukraine, in Spain, in the U.S., and in England. For better or for worse, influencers and unscrupulous communicators have also responded by telling people what they want to hear, and profiting enormously. Beyond outrage and emotionWhen I want to know how technology is affecting the media business, I can’t think of anyone more knowledgeable than Ben Thompson, who has been writing the Stratechery blog for a dozen years. (Its subscription-based model is highly profitable, incidentally.) In his most recent post, Content and Community, he explains why it’s so hard for independent content creators to stand out from the crowd. The big media companies, he says, compete for your time. “The more of it they capture, the more money they can make . . . . Where we once had editors deciding what was newsworthy, we now have engagement-maximizing algorithms that prioritize outrage, emotion, and compulsive scrolling.” The hope of AIAnd now media companies are seeing their original content stolen, without payment, by the large language models (LLMs) created by tech companies. The last lifeline of many media was traffic from search and social, but AI overviews, with their more personalized, responsive agents, have reduced traffic to websites. Thompson, however, is an optimist. He walks us through a series of scenarios in which media companies can collaborate with the big AI companies to create revenue for both. He predicts that “as LLMs (large language models) consume everything . . . the hunger for something shared is going to increase.” He concludes that communities with shared values can be built around original content — “an essay, a podcast, or a video” — and that can lead to economic benefit for content creators. Final thought: the end of the monopolyMore than a decade ago, some of us digital media people were predicting that the internet meant “the end of the monopoly” of newspaper chains, TV networks, and radio stations. We were optimistic that new, independent media could give voice to the voiceless, that new creators would be able to bypass the gatekeepers at those big media outlets and tell stories that previously were suppressed. In the Arab Spring of 2010, pro-democracy uprisings spread across the Arab world, fueled by social media that autocratic governments couldn’t control or censor. It looked like democracy was on the march and would be unstoppable. Today in the U.S., those who protest the anti-immigration policies are avoiding social media. It has become a tool of the authorities to identify, track down, and arrest dissidents. Once again, the latest communication technology is in the hands of a half-dozen big tech companies (see AI in the attention economy: Friend, Foe, or Fix). But the tools these companies create allow individuals to create their own AI agents. And again, people are empowered to create communities with new communication technologies. There is still a market for trustworthy communication among real people, not bots and algorithms. That’s where Thompson and I share an optimistic view. There are real opportunities for digital media today.
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