Attention and Gestures
Software as a service turns the business of software upside down. As online search advertising revenue accelerates, technology companies are under increasing pressure to come up with a way to transition to this new paradigm or lose their dominant position on the desktop. The use of attention data is shifting users away from a software subscription model to an advertising model where users’ behavior is leveraged to more efficiently predict what advertising will be clicked on.
Attention is the recording of browser behavior — what sites or RSS feeds people visit, and more specifically what items they look at and in what order. The results are then aggregated and compared for similarities between like-minded behavior: For those people who go to a site promoting information about the iPhone and iPod Touch, how many of them also visit Lexus dealerships online. Content produced around the popular Apple devices attract early adopters who like to stay at the leading edge of technology in the market in many other areas — entertainment systems, tech-aware airlines, high performance vehicles, and so on.
As social networks grow in popularity, users are building profiles of who they are, and more importantly who their friends and business associates are. These affinity groups let users poll their friends for word-of-mouth recommendations about products, information sources, and job leads, and in return provide even more efficient data — called gestures — messages to publishers and via them vendors describing what messages and information they are looking for. Combining the attention data with personalized social graph gestures, or profiles, creates self-selecting pre-qualified pools of trigger pullers, far more efficient than broadcast or even search advertising that require amassing millions of impressions to get thousands of potential leads.
