seeking attention?
The internet has made many things cheap.
- Building a website and creating a retail platform is cheap.
- Maintaining a website is cheap.
- Conveying vast amounts of interactive information in text, image and video is cheap.
- Talking to somebody on the other side of the world is cheap.
- Selling to people on the other side of the world is cheap.
However, there is one that is definitely not cheap, and that’s ATTENTION. People’s time is as valuable as it ever was (arguably more), and just because your website can be accessed by somebody in Mexico, doesn’t mean that person will access your site.
Search engines are, of course, a ruthlessly efficient way of finding the right attention for your products (because people type into search engines what they are interested in) but you pay for that efficiency. If you provide pay-day loans, you now don’t have to cast a wide net over the Jeremy Kyle television demographic. You can restrict your advertising to people who type “pay day loans” into Yahoo (Google, Bing etc).
The internet is a mature sales environment however (it matured quickly because huge sums of money were involved), and the growth in potential targeted attention is mirrored by the growth in competition for that attention.
So yes it’s cheap to get to market, and you can open up your business to the world…but so can everybody else. We are all competing for attention online, and it’s the demand for attention that drives the price.
