How much would you sell your attention for?
I have an unethical startup idea.
I would ask my customers to sign up to pay for their attention. Customers would log in and start streaming a 10-minute video. The content of the video is something that I’ll decide. Rest assured, it won’t be blood violence or NSFW or anything else that you’ll need to turn your face away from. What I will show is ads — a lot of them, and a lot of news. At the end of 10 minutes, the customer would have to answer a few questions on the content they watched. This is to ensure that they did actually watch (and understand) it and did not go for a stroll while the video was playing. If they answer satisfactorily, they will be paid. The question is — how much should this payment be for you to sign up?
See, most of us are already doing this. We conveniently watch hours and hours of ads while watching TV, playing free games or scrolling down the infinite feeds on Facebook and Instagram. Instead of intermittent ads that get thrown at your face when you are doing something else, what I am offering is much cleaner. You can set this time aside just to watch ads at a time which is convenient to you. And you are getting paid, right? So take your time, think about it and tell me your price.
If you say anything below Rs. 20, we are in business. Hold on for a bit and I will be back.
To those who won’t sign up for any trivial amount, maybe you see the wickedness behind this idea. Good job! If you will sign up but for a greater amount, you do realize that your attention is worth more than Rs. 2 a minute. It’s a good start. I find this utterly fascinating. Most of us have no good way to evaluate our time and attention and so we wholeheartedly spend it on Bollywood news, prank videos, TikTok dance moves and whatnot. (If you are truly entertained by these, that’s different. I am talking about people who would watch this because it just showed up in feed and they were bored anyway). The point is — the moment we see someone else making money on our attention, we see them as evil for selling our ‘valuable’ attention to advertisers.
Personally speaking, I don’t have any issues whatsoever with media platforms selling my attention to advertisers. In fact, I advocate it to a limit. This model is what has made the best internet inventions free for the common people. Advertising money has improved lives and made the digital revolution possible. If I have to sit through a 5 second video ad so that I can resume watching a blockchain tutorial on YouTube, I will do it with humility and patience.
Now, let me return to my future customers who are willing to give me 10 minutes of their time in return of Rs. 20 or less. Thanks for showing faith in me but this is a pretty aweful deal for you. And I am not talking about money. Well, let’s cover money first and then, we’ll discuss more serious stuff.
Targeted video ads (on Facebook and YouTube) would cost anywhere from Rs. 2 to Rs. 20 per view. The problem that advertisers face on those platform is that they can’t assess your attention. You may scroll past the video, or skip it before they start making sense or you might be sipping tea while the ad is playing. There is no way to know. Most people won’t watch an ad beyond 5 seconds which is too little time for the ad to make a convincing case. Also, since you were already watching or doing something else before that ad came up, you are severely distracted while the ad is playing. With my idea, I’ve solved all these problems and hence, I can charge many multiple times of what today’s popular platforms charge. I won’t go into the mathematics because that’s not the point. But, I’ve done it for myself. At Rs. 20, this business is a hit.
There is one argument that I can watch ads all day and it does not affect my decisions. That’s just overestimating your will power and not realizing the truth that your brain is engineered to compress and store all new information. All of that information is available for conscious or subconscious use, irrespective of how smart you are. Even when you watching ads with a frown on your face, hating it and waiting for it to get over, you are absorbing information. Personally, ads on mobile games are the most irritating. Yet, I have acted on those ads in the past and downloaded ‘advertised’ games.
Now onto the serious bit. Ads are innocent. Ads are someone who has made something of value trying to create awareness for their product or service. What’s not so innocent is news. Especially polarizing news — the kind of news that is popular today. Depending upon your worldview, I can decide which way you could be swayed easily and deliver content to do that. I can assess your progress with the help of the questionnaire you will fill up after every stream. When it’s time, a politician or an influencer you trust can reserve this entire 10-minute slot to build a convincing case for you. If you were not careful, you could be reprogrammed to be a person you never were, in due time.
Unfortunately, that is the current state of affairs even without my startup. Other than the real world, there is a miniverse that each of us is living in, and that is defined by the media we use, the people we follow therein and the words we hear from them. And this is so different for each of us even though we might be in the same physical room! With more and more immersive media, worldviews will take shape in the miniverse and manifest themselves in the real world. We will see more Instagram-inspired dresses and vacations and news-induced social conflicts in the times to come.
So what can we do? Well, I won’t ask you to be a social media monk yet. You can get far just by a tiny bit of skepticism. Pardon the ads. They do you good, more than you realize. It is the guy who is selling you a conspiracy theory that you need to watch out. If you find someone yelling at a person, community, idea that you resent as well, that’s that guy. He is not your think-alike buddy. He is an agent hired to persuade you using the power of confirmation bias.
Lastly, political or not, evil or innocent, we are what we watch. If corporations can sell our attention, this means it has value. It is time we start valuing it too. If we can be reprogrammed, we might as well reprogram ourselves the be the best of us by attending to the right things.
