Why the attention economy is becoming the inattention economy

Posted by Mike O'Brien on June 24, 2026 in Postcards from the digital frontier | Leave a comment

In the attention economy, every brand brings another cake to a table where nobody can eat any more.

Marketing has never seen more of human behaviour than it sees now. Every swipe, search and scroll produces a signal, every signal becomes data, and every fragment of data becomes another opportunity to attract, influence and hold attention. The average internet user now spends six hours and thirty-eight minutes online each day, according to DataReportal’s Digital 2025 report, and for most of those hours a brand is somewhere in the frame. Platforms have never held more data. Advertisers have never had more precision. By almost any measure the industry has become extraordinarily good at its stated task.

And yet a question sits underneath all of it, rarely asked because the whole apparatus is built to avoid asking it. The profession has become exceptionally good at measuring attention as an asset. It has remained almost wholly unable to measure attention as a cost.

What gets measured gets optimised

No marketing director sets out to exhaust the people they are trying to reach. The pressures that produce that outcome are structural, not malicious. Every organisation is told to increase reach, frequency, engagement, output and visibility, and each of those instructions is rational when considered on its own. The difficulty is that thousands of organisations are following the same instruction at the same time, competing for a resource that does not grow. There is only so much human attention available in a day, and the supply is fixed. What expands without limit is the volume of content chasing it.

That asymmetry is the heart of the problem, and it is worth stating precisely because it is usually stated backwards. Attention is the scarce resource. Content is the resource in oversupply. When the supply of content rises against a fixed stock of attention, the value of any individual message falls. This is content inflation, and its consequence is attention depletion. Each brand adds to the volume because the alternative, staying quiet while competitors speak, feels like surrender. Every participant behaves rationally. The system they collectively produce does not.

The cost nobody pays

Economists have a name for a cost that is created by a transaction but paid by someone outside it. They call it an externality. Industrial production created pollution. Dense traffic created congestion. Leveraged finance created systemic risk. In each case the party generating the cost was not the party who bore it, which is exactly why the cost went unmanaged for so long. Nobody had a reason to count what they did not have to pay for.

The digital economy has produced an externality of the same shape, and it has gone uncounted for the same reason. When a brand competes for attention, the cost of that competition does not land cleanly on the brand. It does not even land only on the individual being interrupted. It lands on something held in common: the shared attentional environment that every brand, every institution and every citizen draws from and none of them maintains. Each notification, each interruption, each demand to allocate a little more focus is individually trivial and collectively enormous. The brand captures the benefit of its own message. The cost of the noise is distributed across everyone, including the brand itself, which must now shout louder next time to be heard over the din it helped create.

This is why the externality and the older idea of a tragedy of the commons describe the same thing. A commons is depleted when many actors each take a rational share of a shared resource that no one is responsible for replenishing. The attentional commons is being depleted in precisely that way. Herbert Simon saw the mechanism as early as 1971, when he observed that a wealth of information produces a poverty of attention. Thomas Davenport and John Beck pressed the insight further two decades later, naming attention itself as the genuine currency of business, the thing in real short supply once everything else had been digitised into abundance. What Simon identified as an information problem has now matured into a depletion problem. The scarcity he predicted has arrived, and the industry has organised itself to accelerate it.

Cognitive emissions

It is tempting to reach for a measurable analogy, and one suggests itself. Carbon emissions were invisible as a cost until they were named and counted, and naming them changed what could no longer be ignored. The cumulative burden of constant attention extraction might be thought of, by analogy, as a kind of cognitive emission: the residue of a billion small interruptions, none significant on its own, that together wear down the capacity for the sustained thought on which every serious decision depends.

The analogy is useful, and it should be held as an analogy rather than smuggled in as a measured quantity. There is no agreed unit of cognitive emission and there is no register in which it is recorded. That is the entire point. The industry measures attention captured with extraordinary precision and measures attention depleted not at all. Impressions, clicks, dwell times and engagement rates describe what was taken. Nothing in the standard dashboard describes what was spent to take it, or what was worn away in the taking.

Why less may become more

For most of the digital era the advantage belonged to whoever could produce more. More content, more channels, more touchpoints, more frequency. That logic held while attention was relatively abundant and content relatively scarce. It does not hold once the ratio inverts. As content saturates and attention thins, additional volume buys less and less. Messages become interchangeable. The audience grows defensive rather than receptive. Trust, the one thing that actually shortens the distance between a brand and a decision, erodes under the weight of being constantly solicited.

The marketers who understand this first will hold an advantage the volume strategy cannot match. The brands that win the next decade will not be the ones that shout loudest. They will be the ones that earn the right to be heard at all, by being worth the attention they ask for. An impression is not understanding. A click is not trust. Engagement is not contribution. A person can spend hours inside a brand’s content and emerge no better informed and no closer to a decision that serves them. Activity has been mistaken for value for so long that the difference now looks radical, when it is merely accurate.

From extraction to stewardship

The shift this requires is not tactical. It is a change in what marketing believes its job to be. Attention is not raw material to be extracted until the seam runs dry. It is something customers lend, conditionally, and withdraw the moment the loan stops paying them back. Treating it as a commons to be protected rather than a resource to be mined is not an ethical luxury bolted onto commercial strategy. It is the commercial strategy, because the brand that depletes the environment it operates in is shortening its own future to flatter its present.

The question facing marketing leaders was never whether they could generate more engagement. They have proved beyond any doubt that they can. The question is whether the engagement they create earns its place in someone’s day. When every organisation is competing for the same finite attention, the most valuable thing a brand can offer is not another message. It is clarity, and the restraint to offer it only when it helps.

The future of marketing is not learning to capture more attention. It is learning to deserve it. The organisations that thrive in the age of AI will not be those that move first. They will be those that think clearest. For me, every conversation starts with a diagnostic, not a proposal.