The Attention Economy and the Net
Source: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/519 ↗
Goldhaber's 1997 essay coined "the attention economy" as a framework for understanding the internet — the argument that in a world of information abundance, the scarce resource is not information but human attention, and that the internet is primarily an economy organised around capturing, holding and exchanging attention.
Written before Google, before social media, before the smartphone, the essay reads as prophecy.
For product direction it is the foundational text for every product that competes for attention: feeds, notifications, recommendations, engagement metrics — all of them are interventions in Goldhaber's economy.
Read alongside Simon's Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World (which anticipated the idea in 1971) and Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death for the cultural critique.
First Monday is open access; the essay is free.
Central argument
Goldhaber argues that the internet marks a structural economic shift: as information becomes abundant and essentially free, the genuinely scarce resource becomes human attention, and the net is therefore best understood not as an information economy but as an attention economy. He contends that attention itself functions as a form of currency — it is finite, non-transferable, and flows from audiences to 'stars' or creators who accumulate it. This reframes online behaviour away from data exchange toward a competition for cognitive bandwidth, where capturing and holding attention is the primary economic act.
Critique
Goldhaber treats attention as a relatively undifferentiated scarce resource, but a substantive objection is that not all attention is equivalent — deep, sustained attention and fragmented, passive scrolling are economically and humanly very different things, and collapsing them into a single currency obscures important distinctions about value, manipulation, and harm. The framework also tends toward a descriptive fatalism: by framing attention-capture as an economic law, it risks naturalising what are actually design choices, making it harder to ask normative questions about whether products *should* compete for attention in the ways they do.
Why it matters for product
For a CPO, Goldhaber's framework exposes the hidden cost structure of any engagement-optimised product: every metric that rewards time-on-surface or notification open rates is operationalising his attention economy, which means product decisions about feeds, recommendations, and retention loops are not neutral UX choices but positions in a broader economy with real scarcity consequences for users. This is directly relevant to metric design — teams optimising for engagement without a countervailing measure of attention quality are, in Goldhaber's terms, strip-mining a finite resource, which eventually surfaces as user burnout, regulatory pressure, or trust erosion that no feature roadmap can fix.