Attention Economy

A framework that treats human attention as a scarce resource and analyzes competition for its capture, retention, and allocation in economic terms. Economist Herbert Simon noted in 1971 that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”; Michael Goldhaber and others later formalized the concept as the “attention economy.”

In content marketing, the attention economy framework explains why distributing content across the channels and formats where an audience’s attention already resides — podcasts, short video, community feeds — outperforms optimizing a single channel in isolation. The mass migration of B2B audiences from long-form web content to lean-back media is a direct consequence of attention portfolio optimization.