By Guy Bell
At a time when our attention spans have reached all-time lows, I’ll keep this short:
You wake up and check your phone. A notification pulls you into Instagram, where one short video leads to another, then another. Thirty minutes pass. What feels like a small personal habit sits inside an intentional system of relapse. This pattern repeats for billions of people each day, with around 4.9 billion people, roughly 60 % of the world’s population, now using social media platforms, and the average user spending around 2 hours and 24 minutes on these apps daily. In today’s digital market, attention has become a commodity. Companies compete for it, measure it, and sell it. Platforms such as Meta, Google, and TikTok build systems designed to keep users engaged for as long as possible because the longer users stay, the more money these firms earn.
The Commodity of the Digital Age
The logic behind this model is relatively straightforward. Human attention span is limited to only so many hours in a day, and at the same time, the supply of information online has grown at an astounding rate. News, videos, podcasts, and posts all compete for space on the same small screen. In 1971, economist Herbert Simon wrote that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” (p.40), and his insight explains the modern social media market. When information becomes as abundant as it has, attention becomes scarce, and this scarcity creates value for these companies. Digital firms treat attention as an economic resource, much like labour or capital, and they design digital products to capture it and build revenue models around it.
This attention model has also helped drive the rise of short-form content. When revenue depends on watch time and interaction, platforms benefit from material that delivers quick engagement and reduces user friction. Short-form videos lower the cost of attention to the user and increase engagement. Initially pioneered by Vine and later popularised by TikTok, this model played a large part in the rise of short-form content and was later adopted by firms such as Meta and Google as well.
Advertising sits at the core of this attention system. Every large social media platform offers free access to users, and instead of charging subscription fees, they create value by collecting personal data and selling targeted advertising. They track watch time, clicks, and even emotional state, adjusting content feeds in real time to maximise attention. If a user watches a video to the end, the system learns and serves similar content, whereas if a user scrolls past a post, it reduces similar material, and over time, the feed becomes more personalised. Every click, pause, and share provides information about user preferences and behaviour, and then these platforms analyse this data to predict what users might buy or care about. This allows advertisers to then pay to place messages in front of specific groups of an advertisers choosing. Meta earns over 97% of its revenue from digital ads shown across Facebook and Instagram, Google dominates search engine advertising, drawing over 90% of internet traffic placing ads next to search queries, and TikTok inserts ads between short videos in its main feed, generating around £10 billion in revenue. In each case, the company’s revenue depends on how long users stay and how closely they engage with content. Advertisers are the target market, and the product being sold to them is access to attention.
Meltdown of Traditional Media
The rise of the attention economy has reshaped the wider media industry. Digital advertising has shifted revenue away from long-form content, such as newspapers and television broadcasters, to the more streamlined short-form content online, creating a struggle for many local news outlets. At the same time, a small number of platforms now control attention access to vast audiences, with their algorithms influencing the stories that trend and those which remain unseen. This concentration of power carries massive economic and political weight that can shape the outcome of elections and the balance of power worldwide. Additionally, content that drives strong reactions often spreads faster than measured reporting, because engagement metrics reward material that provokes emotion and interaction. Therefore, algorithms can inadvertently or purposely amplify extreme or misleading material, which can travel far within systems that optimise algorithms for clicks and watch time. A commonly recognised risk with algorithmic content.
Government Oversight
So far, there have been few comprehensive steps taken by governments and regulators to respond. The European Union has introduced digital rules aimed at increasing transparency and limiting data misuse, and antitrust cases in the United States are examining the dominance of large firms in online advertising markets. For example, the Federal Trade Commission v. Meta (2025). Beyond competition law, some governments, such as the UK, have introduced online safety legislation such as the Online Safety Act (2023), aimed at reducing harmful and misleading material placing duties on platforms to mitigate this illegal and harmful material, including certain forms of disinformation. However, enforcement challenges and rapid technological change continue to constrain the overall effectiveness of these measures.
The business of attention operates in plain sight on our personal devices. Each notification, recommendation, and autoplay feature reflects a choice about how to capture and hold focus. Advances in artificial intelligence could also lead to improved content targeting, making it more precise and adaptive. As digital systems improve, the value of attention is likely to rise further, and in a world flooded with information, the human mind is the constraint.
You get in bed and quickly check a video your friend sent you. It’s 2 am. It happened again. What feels like casual scrolling is part of an intentional system designed to extract as much attention as possible, day after day.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and may not reflect the opinions of The St Andrews Economist.
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