Member-only story
Attention Markets: A Primer
This post is the first in a series on attention markets — how they work, and how they can improve. Subscribe on Substack to read the rest as they’re published.
You post a tweet; it does numbers. Mute-your-notifications numbers. New followers come pouring in. Damn, this is the big break.
Except, the viral pop ends as quickly as it started. The next tweet fizzles. People moved on.
This is how social media works. It’s a numbers-go-up game where there’s no relationship between what you post and how people respond. The algorithm decides who wins and who loses. Some people claim to have beaten the system, but really we’re all in the dark.
This is the state of modern digital attention markets, environments in which an intermediary (usually an algorithmically-governed platform) connects audiences with content. Attention markets are how most of us find and consume content: through TikTok’s For You Page, Twitter’s algorithmic feed, Apple’s News app. They’re also black boxes. Creators don’t know why their content does well (or not). Audiences don’t know why posts show up in their feeds. The matching process just happens, and winners and losers get made.
Popularity and attention used to not work this way. Movies were successful because a major studio produced and distributed them. TV shows became popular…
