Eyeballs, Experiences & Revenue

Eyeballs help build community, but their impact on revenue is indirect. What ultimately drives revenue are the experiences that occur when people participate in a story. This is what the book The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage is all about and why communities and commerce are tightly linked. Here are a few related links:

Google’s business isn’t really about monetizing eyeballs; it’s about monetizing clicks. That may seem like a small distinction - you have to attract the eyeball, after all, before you can spur the click - but I think there’s actually a very big difference. Eyeball monetization is the traditional media strategy: publish or broadcast content that attracts readers or viewers, and then intersperse ads among that content. The content, in this case, serves not to prompt action directly, but merely to draw an audience that’s attractive to companies looking to promote their products and services. There’s a natural distance, in other words, between the content and the ads - a distance that’s good for the content producer but often frustrating to the advertiser. The click monetization strategy removes that distance. In Google’s AdSense program, for instance, a media company, or other content producer, earns nothing by simply attracting eyeballs. It only brings in cash by getting viewers to click on an ad link.

Rough Type: The Click Economy

yes, in an attention economy, you have to get the eyeballs first. But the money, as many found out with internet stocks, does not automatically follow the eyeballs.

Interview with Richard Lanham

all the crap about attention allocation is primarily because that’s one of the best ways to build a community.
Community Value