Attention
Editor’s Note: We co-authored a piece for Advertising Week with Phillip Jackson of Future Commerce that discussed the Coinbase Super Bowl ad. We didn’t like it as much as other folks did for a couple reasons, and we covered that there. Though perhaps “old news,” it relates to some of the larger points covered below. It’d be cool if you read that, too.
In November 2013, a media startup, Upworthy, announced 87 million people had visited its website. They were mostly from Facebook.
Within a few months, Upworthy wasn’t just publishing stories; it was the subject of stories. The Atlantic wrote about its rise, internal training decks were published by Business Insider, and the Washington Post covered Upworthy’s Twitter beef with CNN. Upworthy was clickbait as an art form, and everyone marveled at it.
Until Facebook changed its algorithm.
A year later, Upworthy’s monthly unique visitor count was around 20 million. And no one, really, was paying much attention to it.
There has been a lot of discussion among advertisers the last few weeks about Facebook, advertising, and it’s ability to fix its “core product.”
We think folks have part of the discussion wrong, and it’s worth discussing—not because of what it might mean for Facebook ad spend going forward, but for what it means for advertising more generally.
Facebook’s core product is not advertising. It is attention.
While advertising is important to Facebook now (and maybe always will be), it’s secondary in nature to attention. And, right now, with a slower user base and advertising headwinds, Facebook is stuck in a classic innovators dilemma. You see this recognition from Facebook itself (Meta, VR, metaverse future, etc).
After all, you need people’s attention in order to profit off of them.
Ben Thompson from Stratechery has previously pointed out that “one of the hallmarks of the Internet is that the entire funnel is often compressed into a single Facebook ad that you might only see for a fraction of a second.”
Though Thompson is speaking without judgment here, there is a lot of discussion that this is a good thing. Because Facebook is so good at owning attention, many brands (like Upworthy before them) haven’t invested as much in attention-building, just engagement.
In other words, they’re starting further down the funnel.
This is helpful, no doubt, for smaller brands looking to make sales quickly, just as it was helpful for Upworthy’s incredible rise. But it comes at a price.
Attention may not be the easiest to quantify, but it is the most valuable to monetize once you’ve learned how to hold it.