Attention Merchants – The Age of Hybrid Consumption

Do we draw any lines between the private and the commercial? If so, what times and spaces should we consider as too valuable, personal, or sacrosanct for the usual onslaught?

How we engage has changed, seemingly forever. The million dollar question, therefor, is: has that change been for better of for worse? As someone who is coming into the field at a key point of industry transformation this is the question that will likely define my career. What we create, who we create for, and even how we create is already in the middle of its metamorphosis.

A prominent point of this transformation is discussed in The Attention Merchants, as Tim Wu divulges how our attention is harvested as a transaction the majority of us have accepted over opening our wallets. Google, Youtube, and even Facebook use this model however giants like Netflix and Hulu signal a possible shift away from such transactions. Their success suggests an aversion to media that observes and harvests us. These new-age media giants demonstrate the new market environment for media creators. We do not have a set model to attempt to sell our products as the new multiplicities of monetisation leave us with both more freedom and more risk. Our content no longer has single paths of consumption and that means that our creations must take audiences into account more than ever before.

The question of how we pay for media has been on my mind since entering my teenage years. I was part of a torrenting generation that challenged the music, television, and film industries, and Youtube and Netflix have been responses to that, both in different ways. We seem to exist, at this moment, in a pendulum, ever shifting between “Free” and “Instantaneous”.

With the pendulum showing no signs of slowing down, hybrid models are starting to form. An interesting look into hybrid marketing models is Spotify. The music giant boasts 100,000,000 subscribers, its numbers of paid subscribers nearly equaling those under the ad-supported free subscription. These numbers giving a good example of the current climate around methods of transaction. Whilst Netflix and Hulu are purely paid subscription platforms and Youtube is having a hard time getting people to pay for their content through Youtube Red, there are other video sites that have managed a similar model to Spotify. As someone who watches predominantly non-American productions I use many sites that hold Eastern media of varying production qualities. Some interesting examples are Viki and DramaFever. The two sites hold Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese (amongst others) dramas and movies along-side more amateur content from prominent Youtubers, celebrities, and content creators. You can access most content from within the free subscription but early access, add-free viewership, and higher quality videos can all be purchased through a variety of different subscription options.

These kinds of hybrid models are becoming more and more common and, whilst older sites find it hard to adapt their templates (youtube), it is becoming an effective business model for newer sites. Choice, it seems, is the trend within the media industry as attempting to gage public opinion as to which model you should follow can be risky. It’s far easier to invest in something that incorporates all sides of the equation, effectively eliminating much of the risk. For me this is an incredibly exciting concept. Overwhelming advertising is an unsavoury option, but paying directly for media is ineffective. That is why sites like Netflix exploded in the first place. We weren’t ‘paying’ for our movies and television per-se, we were paying for access to a massive library of movies and television shows that were accessible and high quality.

As far as I can see the era of paying directly for media is well and truely over. It is a taxation system that we all want, though what it is that we tax is different depending on the viewer… So has the industry changed for the better? Its still way too early to tell but I think if we continue the trend of choice based subscriptions, the question itself may well become obsolete, because that moral dictation can be made by the individual who directly decides which currency they use: money or attention.