A person can now reach more information before breakfast than an earlier reader might have encountered in weeks. Yet the person still wakes with roughly the same number of hours available. Abundance grew on one side of the screen. Capacity did not grow on the other.
That mismatch is the starting point of the attention economy. The internet reduced the cost of producing and distributing information. It did not eliminate scarcity. It moved scarcity from information to selection: what gets noticed, remembered and acted upon.
The scarce thing changed
Herbert Simon framed the core constraint decades before social feeds: information abundance creates a shortage of the attention needed to process it. Digital distribution made publication dramatically cheaper, but the recipient still has limited time and cognitive capacity.
When one constraint becomes cheaper, value often moves toward the next constraint in the system.
Who buys attention?
Advertisers are the obvious buyers, but they are not the only ones. Political campaigns, creators, retailers, streaming services and software products all compete for mental priority. Some pay for impressions. Others invest in design, recommendation systems or distribution.
Company filings make the incentive visible. Meta says substantially all of its Family of Apps revenue is generated from advertising and reports ad impressions as a key business metric. Alphabet similarly tracks paid clicks, impressions and advertising revenue across its properties. That does not prove every design choice aims to maximise time spent, but it shows why attention and user actions are economically valuable.
The business model matters more than the screen
It is tempting to tell the story as a fight between weak human willpower and addictive apps. That explanation is too small. Product design responds to what revenue rewards. If income rises when users stay longer and see more advertisements, the organisation has a reason to improve retention. If income rises when users finish a task quickly, the incentive can point in the opposite direction.
Before asking whether a product wants attention, ask which user behaviour creates revenue.
Attention is not a single resource
Time spent is easy to measure, so it is often treated as a substitute for attention. But attention has depth, direction and context. A person can leave a video running without watching it, read a paragraph carefully in thirty seconds or think about one idea for the rest of the day.
This is why crude engagement metrics can distort both product decisions and public debate. They count the visible trace of attention, not always its quality.
Source map
The sources below support the scarcity framework and the business-model mechanism. They do not turn every product-design claim into a causal finding.
- Herbert A. Simon, Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World, 1971
- Meta Platforms 2025 Form 10-K - advertising revenue, impressions and user activity
- Alphabet 2025 Form 10-K - advertising products, paid clicks and impressions
What remains uncertain
Attention is difficult to measure cleanly. Time, clicks and impressions are proxies. A full causal account of how a particular product changes attention would require product-level experiments, user studies and access to internal metrics that public filings cannot provide.