Attention is the new currency

In my days at O2 content visionaries kept asking one question: how do you predict what Gen Y thinks is hot, so you can capitalise on it? It’s a good question, because Gen Y’s attention could be for one day, or one year.

The answer is: Don’t. When fads either die or become trends with lightning speed it’s pointless. Instead, create a system that alerts you to a blip and allows you to react quickly. Because what you want to capitalise on is attention.

Attention is the new currency. It comes from all directions.

Music polemicist Bob Lefsetz posted a LefsetzLetter to his list raving about Prince’s halftime Super Bowl concert while Prince was still playing. Meanwhile on MOG, a music social net, Crash Pryor posted his head-shaking disappointment, also while the purple one was playing. Within a few hours the show was on YouTube and you could make up you own mind.

MOG is a fascinating place to observe the currency of attention. When members recommend artists to each other they usually use YouTube videos as a tool. Even though they can upload mp3s they don’t – not because of copyright issues, but because it’s too much hassle. YouTube is a search and a click to imbed the link. Make referencing an mp3 as easy and you’d probably find as many audios. It’s not just about the latest indie bands either. Reporting a live Ennio Morricone concert at Radio City included both video clips of Morricone and classic scenes from Sergio Leone films, leading another member to youtube Yojimbo (the source of A Fistful of Dollars) and off they went into a discussion of Kurosawa.

(Will “to youtube” become a verb like “to google”?)

Within the current copyright framework almost everything mentioned above breaks the law. One way to bring it within the law is to shift copyright emphasis from ownership to distribution. Acting from ownership, to control when and where your content is permitted, is a lost cause – Nielsen estimates that 2/3 – 3/4 of Net traffic is made up of bit torrent files. But shifting emphasis to distribution creates a different environment. First of all, potential customers are already doing the distribution. Create buying opportunities at all the attention points along the chain, make it as simple as imbedding a YouTube video, and the potential market increases exponentially. If you also think of the actual distribution as the spreading of attention and then monetise that, it becomes in content owners’ interest for their material to be shared as much as possible.

How to charge? Advertising and licensing are the most attractive. When a person jumps from Morricone to Leone to Kurosawa, or Girls Aloud to Sugarbabes, Garbage, Eurythmics, Tori Amos and Bjork (as another MOG thread did), discrete charging is illogical. But if ISPs charged an extra dollar, euro or pound per month, if media giants fed YouTube, which prioritised a proper tracking and payment system (isn’t that really the crux of the Viacom-YT tiff?), if music files were open-source, how much extra money would be generated by people sharing, recommending, giving their attention? Distributing the money is one of the easier parts: payment distribution systems are largely in place through existing rights collecting societies (MCPS/PRS, BMI, Jasrac, etc.), who regularly track and make payments to thousands of people.

To a degree, social nets and cultural aggregators like YouTube are the systems that aggregate attention. What’s needed now is the layer that builds the revenue.