Attention Economy (6)

Attention Economy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy

Sales Lead Generation

The realization that the attention focused by search engines was a valuable commodity led to the creation of the paid inclusion model, in which search engines charge advertisers to have hyperlinks to their sites included in search results. The dominant form of paid inclusion is pay for performance, in which advertisers bid on the rights to have their hyperlinks listed in the results for a given search query. The auction winner then pays the search engine the agreed price per user that follows their hyperlink. With the advent of paid inclusion, profit-seeking web sites could choose to legitimately pay for the attention of searchers, rather than attempting to subvert search algorithms.

The paid inclusion model, as well as more pervasive advertising networks like Yahoo! Publisher Network and Google's Adsense, work by treating consumer attention as the property of the search engine (in the case of paid inclusion) or the publisher (in the case of advertising networks). This is somewhat different from the anti-spam uses of property rights in attention, which treat an individual's attention as his or her own property.

One approach to sales lead generation which does treat individuals' attention as their own property is that of ROOT Markets, a startup founded in early 2005. ROOT Markets intends to create a commercial exchange for the trading of information about human attention (to media) and intention (to buy products or services). An individual can record his or her on-line attention data by installing a web browser extension that logs browsing history. This data can then be bought by investors in the attention market and sold to advertisers (Goldstein 2005). The main difference with the current web advertising model is that individual consumers, not just publishers, can sell attention, and that third-party investors can easily enter the market to engage in arbitrage. It remains to be seen whether ROOT Market's attempt to create an attention exchange will be successful.

Reference for Wikipedia