Get Paid For Your Attention (Part 1)

In our technology-driven society, we are inundated with information. Social media feeds provide nearly-infinite feeds of real-time information, emails provide streams of unstoppable messages, and advertisements appear in every electronic or paper medium imaginable. It is clear that as we become overloaded with information, it is our attention, rather than information, that becomes the limiting factor. Technology allows information providers to provide far more information than we can possibly consume, so they now battle each other over our attention. By treating human attention as a scarce good, we develop attention economies in which economic theories are applied to the dynamics of human attention.

Although these platforms are fighting for our attention, very few information sources actually compensate users for their attention. Some may argue that that we should not expect to be paid in a free platform, such as Facebook, since it is precisely our attention that is monetized in order to keep the platform free. However there are now many novel projects aiming to provide free platforms that also manage to compensate users for their attention. Many of these new projects utilize cryptocurrencies in order to accomplish this goal, allowing users of the platform to explicitly value attention in terms of tokens. In this series of articles, I will review some of the key platforms that are revolutionizing the way that we view and monetize our attention.

Earn.com

Earn’s platform is a very simple way to monetize your attention. After signing up to their platform (you will need a company or school email), you will have a profile on their website. You will then be paid to receive and respond to messages and other tasks sent to you by other people on the platform. Currently, payments are provided in the form of Bitcoin. The specific payment amount is up to you — but typically this should scale with how “important” of a person you are. Beyond this, Earn also has lists that you can register to, allowing you to receive messages from people targeting a specific demographic or group of people. For example, there are lists that aggregate people from certain universities or professions. There is also a well-known list for airdrop recipients, allowing users to be paid to receive free tokens from developing projects.

These features allow users of the platform to receive monetary compensation for their attention, and allows information senders to ensure that their content is being viewed and taken seriously (or their money is refunded), and sent to the intended groups of people. Even though the exact amount per message is usually quite small, simply changing the act of receiving a message from a neutral activity to a positive activity is enough to incentivize much higher levels of engagement. Additionally, information senders can utilize lists to ensure that their information is relevant to all who receive it — they do not need to rely on a secondary level of content filtering or recommendation for relevancy.

Currently the platform uses Bitcoin as its method of compensating users for their attention. Later this year, Earn plans to move to their own token that they will provide through use of the platform, rather than through an ICO. Tokens will be provided to users who actively participate in Earn’s token-based social network, such as by signing up, responding to messages, joining lists, doing targeted tasks such as surveys, and referring others to the platform. Information senders, conversely, will utilize the tokens to pay for users’ attention and compensate them for responding to messages and completing tasks. Ultimately, this token will measure the value of human attention, and Earn’s token-based social network will operate as an attention economy in which social actions requiring attention are valued in tokens.

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Get Paid For Your Attention (Part 1) was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.