The phrase “attention economy” has become so common that it has almost stopped meaning anything. We use it to describe everything from TikTok’s algorithm to the design of a newspaper front page, which suggests we are not being precise enough about what we are actually talking about.
Attention is not a finite resource in the way that oil or water is finite. It is a relationship — a quality of engagement between a reader and a piece of work. The scarcity is not in the reading; it is in the trust that makes reading possible.
Publications that are worth reading have always understood this. They make a promise to the reader and they keep it. The form changes. The promise does not.
What the platform era changed is not that attention became scarce, but that the intermediaries between publishers and readers became powerful enough to break the relationship entirely. The reader no longer comes directly. They come via something else, and that something else has its own interests.
Getting back to the direct relationship is the strategic problem of the next decade in media. Some publications will solve it. Most will not.