Media businesses, creators, marketers, and brands have tracked this high-stakes competition for consumer attention but often equate it to a contest for consumption, comparing box scores of hours watched or eyeballs reached.
This focus on the quantity of time spent—or the size of audience—overlooks a more important issue: the quality of time spent. Not all consumer attention is created equal. Consumption and monetization vary widely across 20 major mediums in the attention economy, and differing levels of attention are a key reason for that variability.
New McKinsey research suggests that the media business has been missing the full story on consumer attention. Backed by an in-depth survey of 7,000 consumers worldwide—including 3,000 in the United States, which form the basis for this report—we have developed an “attention equation” that reveals the full drivers of attention value.1 Attention doesn’t simply equal the amount of time spent; it equals the amount of valuable time spent, driven by focus and intent.
This new way of thinking about media monetization includes an assessment of what makes attention valuable, which media formats are most efficient at monetizing attention, how distinct consumer segments approach media consumption, and strategies and questions for media players to consider as they compete in the attention economy. (Use the interactive calculator to estimate the value of attention with differing mediums and other factors.)
The distracted state of consumer attention
The challenge of attracting and retaining consumer attention is a matter of supply and demand. The sheer volume and diversity of content available to audiences is greater than ever before. But the time that people have or are willing to devote to consuming those various forms and formats of media and entertainment, including video, audio, gaming, print, social platforms, and live events, is finite.
Over the past decade, the total number of hours each day that consumers watch, listen to, read, or otherwise interact with content has barely grown, increasing roughly 1 to 2 percent a year. At the same time, technological innovations in production and distribution, the rise of user-generated content, and the proliferation of premium content have created a dizzying array of choices. There are 50 times more amateur uploaders than professionals on Spotify, 25,000 times more hours of content produced last year on YouTube than on all traditional television networks and video streaming services, and every new television season and movie release competes for time on the same platforms that offer nearly every series and film that came before it.
The missing piece of the attention equation
What accounts for such wide disparities in media monetization? Part of it stems from well-understood factors such as the underlying industry dynamics and content scarcity, the mix of consumer demographics, and the relative effectiveness of advertising across media. However, new McKinsey research shows that traditional commercial factors such as consumer value, platform sophistication, and industry structure—or what we call the “commercial quotient”—explain only about two-thirds of the variance in attention monetization. The other third is driven by the quality of consumers’ attention, or the “attention quotient,” a factor that hasn’t been front and center in most discussions about media monetization until now.
Read the full article by McKinsey & Company
