A Primer on Digital 'Content' Markets
How communication is bought with and sold for attention online
I recently published my debut essay on Substack, “the Leviathan, the Hand, and the Maelstrom” (LHM). Though I’m optimistic it’ll continue to find readers, it’s a long piece, and I don’t want the ideas within to be held hostage to folks’ willingness to read 12,000 words. So I’ve decided to write a shorter primer on one of the main issues it explores—markets for digital content.
In LHM, I argue that the new digital media ecosystem founded on social media and the smartphone ought to be reframed as a social institution that operates on market principles. Within that system, acts of communication, i.e. posts on social media, are bought and sold not mainly for hard currency, but for attention, as measured by engagement metrics such as views, likes, and reposts.
The idea is to reconceive of social media as a marketplace patronized by ‘sellers’ of communication across different mediums (so of images, of video, and so on) and ‘buyers,’ who disburse some quantity of attention to those sellers in exchange for their ‘content,’ content being our new bit of vernacular for saleable communication of this kind.
But in what sense is content really “bought and sold?” Should this claim be read literally? In my opinion, yes. Attention as it exists online is a form of money. It has all of money’s defining properties, namely being a medium of exchange, a unit account, and a store of value. Running through these in turn:
Attention is a medium of exchange because we give it away to others and, in the case of social media, get content in return. There is no way to engage with a given piece of content, absent giving up some attention to its creator.
Attention is a unit of account because it is measured so as to, in effect, ‘value’ pieces of content. This is what engagement metrics do—they quantify how much, and also what kind of attention a given piece of content has received. They price that piece of content in attentional terms. Although, unlike regular prices, attentional prices don’t convey information about the cost of consumption to the consumer—the time any one person must spend to engage with the content at issue won’t be reflected in its engagement metrics, only how much attention in aggregate it is has received. This an important difference, but it doesn’t mean attentional prices aren’t genuine prices. All it means is that they aggregate different information to prices in the traditional economy.
Attention is also—although I expect somewhat more controversially—a store of value. When a given creator receives a certain amount of attention, they can reuse it later. Now, it is of course not their attention—content creators are not vampires sucking attention from their followers, so that they can live longer and disburse more attention themselves—but they can still disburse other people’s attention in a manner analogous to how an individual might spend money they first received from someone else.
They can do this, for example, by telling their followers to watch something made by another creator, or by showing their followers an ad. Granted, the quantity of attention they have ‘stored’ is volatile; it is not an amount that linearly increases with each additional view they get. Rather, the amount of attention they ‘have’ is a kind of projection of how much they command at any given amount. We might model this amount by asking how much attention a given creator could direct, at a given time, to an arbitrarily chosen piece of content. That is, very roughly, the amount of attention they have accumulated. This is a case where attention behaves very differently from other forms of money, but the difference is not, I think, large enough to prevent attention from being a store of value.
The stored value of hard currencies is hardly stable itself. 1 dollar this year is not 1 dollar last year—that the quantification is the same does not mean the two dollars’ underlying ‘real’ value is. Attention, in the same way, can be inflated and deflated. 5000 followers this year may not amount in ‘real terms’ to 5000 followers last year, if say, these followers have a lower propensity to consume other content the followed creator directs them to, or if they disburse less attention online this year, for whatever reason, as measured by other engagement metrics.
This gets at the question of what ‘backs’ attention’s value. Interestingly, attention’s most basic form of real value, unlike hard currencies,’ is not dependent on convention. Hard currencies are valuable, at least in the modern day, because states accept them as tax payment and oblige private individuals and firms to accept them in exchange for goods and services. But attention is valuable at least in part because we enjoy it intrinsically for social, psychological, and biological reasons. So in this respect attention’s value is more stable than hard currencies’ value. We might say it is less stable in the short run and more stable in the very long run. The real value of the attention a given creator has ‘stored’ at any given time may be somewhat opaque, but we know for certain that attention as such will always have real value as long as we are the sorts of organisms who crave it.
One issue I neglected to discussed in LHM is how content markets ‘clear.’ This is a perplexing question at first glance, since content is not consumed in anything like the way traditional goods and services are. It is not a rival good, and it can’t be depleted or used up. There is no sense in which, once content supply equilibrates with content demand, content inventories are emptied. Rather, content is just endlessly created and never strictly exits the market; it is priced and repriced for eternity as it is consumed repeatedly by different people. Depending on how we frame this process, that means content markets either never clear, since content can always be re-priced by a future consumer’s engagement, or are perpetually clearing, since they are being consumed over and over, albeit at different price points.
We could of course imagine an idealized content market in which a static amount of content is created and consumers have a static amount of attention to give. Then markets do clear: at a certain point consumers will “die,” having disbursed all their available attention, and there will be a final distribution of attention across all the content in the market.
Another more complicated model might give both creators and consumers time allowances for content production and attention disbursal, respectively, and examine what clearance looks like in an environment where creators can choose to produce different amounts, or even types of content, at the cost of different amounts of time.
Exploring the behavior of such models with traditional economic methods might prove interesting, but in realistic content markets, the supply of and demand for content are extremely elastic (at least in the upward direction). New content is always flooding the market and new consumers are always joining social media, and pricing and repricing both old and new content through their engagement.
This gets at a few other interesting feature of content markets: consumers, without exception, set all of the prices, the process of price-setting and consumption are perfectly coextensive, and price determination is merely additive. Content creators obviously don’t set the level of engagement garnered by their posts in advance, in the way that firms set their own prices (even if only by choosing to sell at the prevailing market price). Consumers set all the prices and do so through their consumption: it is how, and how much they ‘pay attention’ to certain posts that determines those posts’ engagement metrics, which amount in this context to their price. In content markets, there is no price-setting besides this form of consumption, and there is no consumption besides this form of price-setting; consumption and price-setting are metaphysically intertwined. The process of price discovery is therefore much simpler than in traditional markets. Rather than reflecting the complex convergence of initially disparate bids and asks, prices are just engagement metrics which rise as more people consume the content at issue.
In summary, digital content markets are large, diverse, transparent, procedurally efficient social systems for incentivizing the creation of, and determining the ‘attentional value’ of discrete instances of communication.
This makes sense given the superordinate business function they serve for the major platform companies: to keep people on their platforms, so that those people can be shown ads. Platforms are markets that incentivize the generation of maximally engaging content. They offload the process of attracting consumers to advertisements to consumers themselves, who are compensated for keeping each other on platforms through their content by the attention they receive in return for it.
In LHM, I argue that our being corralled in large numbers ‘into’ these markets has had serious social costs over the last fifteen years, ones that speak not just to the temporary effects of technological change, but to changes of the more tectonic kind we associate with the formation of major social institutions like states or traditional markets.
If you’ve found this short primer valuable, please consider giving the original essay a read.