Every day, humanity creates roughly 402 million terabytes of data. To put that in perspective. Eric Schmidt famously shared: “from the dawn of human civilization through 2003, we created an estimated 5 exabytes of information total. By 2013, we were generating that same amount every two days.” Now it takes minutes and most of it will never be seen by anyone.
Meanwhile, our capacity to process any of it is shrinking. Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at UC Irvine, has been tracking attention spans for two decades. In 2004, people averaged 2.5 minutes on any screen before switching to another. By 2012, that dropped to 75 seconds. Today, it’s just 47 seconds.
We’re now producing more than ever and absorbing less than ever, which creates a problem that economist Herbert Simon identified back in 1971: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
Simon saw it coming before the internet even existed. He understood that when information becomes abundant, attention becomes the bottleneck. The scarce resource. The thing that actually matters.
This inversion is now the operating system of modern life.
So What Is It, Actually?
The attention economy describes a reality where human focus—not content, not data, not information—is what’s genuinely scarce. And scarcity creates value, massive value.
Money
The combined market value of just the top five companies powering the attention economy tops more than $15.7 trillion. That value didn’t come from nowhere, it’s built on time. Globally, TikTok users spend nearly 35 hours per month on the platform. YouTube commands over 27 hours monthly per user around the world. That’s not casual browsing, that’s a part-time job worth of attention flowing to a handful of companies.
Power
The deeper stakes are about power. Attention shapes what people believe, what they buy, who they trust and how they vote. But the systems manufacturing that attention are largely hidden from view. When you control where attention flows, you control the conversation. When you understand how attention moves, you understand how influence actually works. Not the LinkedIn-guru version of influence, but the structural kind that moves markets, builds movements and makes or breaks reputations overnight.
Influence
Consider what happened when Stanley cups went from a niche outdoors product to a cultural phenomenon driven almost entirely by TikTok creators. Or how Labubu, a pointy-eared plush toy, went from niche collectible to $2 billion phenomenon after BLACKPINK’s Lisa posted one clipped to her bag. These brands didn’t manufacture that attention, they caught waves they didn’t create and couldn’t have predicted.
Not all influence arrives as a viral moment though. Vinyl records have grown for 18 consecutive years, from under a million units sold in 2006 to 44 million in 2024, generating $1.4 billion in revenue. The resurgence has been a slow and steady accumulation of aesthetic signals on Pinterest boards and bedroom decor videos, TikTok hauls, a counterweight to digital fatigue.
That’s the attention economy in action: sometimes chaotic and emergent, sometimes slow and gradual but increasingly disconnected from traditional media planning.
What the Attention Economy Is Not
There’s a version of this concept that often gets trotted out in marketing decks and trend reports that completely misses the point.
It’s not about buying ads. Yes, companies spend billions on advertising. Everyone understands that part. But reducing the attention economy to “brands compete for eyeballs” is like describing the internet as “a place with websites.” Technically true, deeply unhelpful. The more interesting questions are about organic attention: how narratives form and spread without paid amplification, why some stories travel and others die, what makes something feel culturally inevitable versus manufactured.
It’s not a social media phenomenon. TikTok and Instagram get the headlines, but attention dynamics now shape everything: which scientific research gets funded (spoiler: the stuff that generates media coverage), which political candidates break through, how companies manage crises, why some product launches become cultural events while others vanish into the void. Even academia isn’t immune, scientists now list media exposure counts on résumés, and PhD theses include how often a candidate’s work has appeared in the popular press. Attention economics have infiltrated academia, politics, journalism and corporate strategy. Limiting the conversation to “kids these days and their phones” misses the structural shift.
It’s not synonymous with engagement metrics. Attention and engagement are related but distinct. You can capture attention without earning trust. You can go viral for reasons that actively damage your reputation. The brands and people who mistake visibility for value, who think any attention is good attention, tend to learn that lesson the hard way.
The Shift That Actually Matters
What’s changed is attention used to flow through gatekeepers. Editors, producers, programmers, the people whose job was to decide what deserved your focus. You could buy access to those gatekeepers through advertising, or you could earn it through relationships and reputation.
That gatekeeping function hasn’t disappeared, but it’s been restructured. Algorithms now perform the curator role that humans once did, except they optimize for engagement rather than editorial judgment. The stories that spread aren’t necessarily the most important or most true, they’re the ones engineered to trigger responses.
This means the old playbooks for communications, PR and marketing are increasingly insufficient. Media relations still matter, but it’s no longer the primary way stories move about the world. A narrative can start on Reddit, jump to TikTok, get picked up by newsletter writers, and land in mainstream coverage, all without anyone pitching a journalist. Or it can start with a traditional press release and die immediately because it wasn’t built to travel through algorithmic environments.
Understanding the attention economy isn’t about mastering one platform or optimizing one channel. It’s about understanding how information moves through interconnected systems and building narratives resilient enough to survive that journey.
Why We Built The ATTN Economy
The ATTN Economy is an independent media company decoding how attention moves, what captures it and how those dynamics shape behavior, culture and markets.
We started The ATTN Economy because most analysis of attention stays siloed. Platform coverage lives in one place, brand strategy in another, media criticism somewhere else. But attention doesn’t respect those boundaries: a gaming controversy becomes a corporate crisis, a TikTok sound reshapes a product launch, a subreddit thread triggers a stock surge. We strive to connect the dots to understand attention and how these systems talk to each other. That’s the gap we’re here to fill.
Why us? Our founding team has collectively spent over three decades in marketing, PR, data analysis, research, brand strategy and design. We were early leaders in a mobile-native world. We wrote the playbooks on how to win in mobile when the industry was still figuring out the rules. We’ve sat in the rooms where reputation is managed and narratives are shaped. We know what organizations need because we’ve needed it ourselves, clear-eyed analysis that ties attention dynamics to business outcomes like where to invest, when to act and how to stay ahead.
Through data-driven analysis, behavioral insights and industry conversations, we decode how attention is manufactured and where it’s headed. Understanding where attention flows is understanding where value gets created, and that’s increasingly the only strategic question that seems to matter.
The attention economy is already reshaping how business works. Your organization will adapt, but will it be strategically or reactively? Subscribe for the insights and analysis that make the difference.
We’re excited to build something that’s been missing in the market and grateful to have you along for the ride. Here’s to making the invisible, visible.
-Lexi, Nikita and Christine