Eyeball Value
So what is your attention worth? In our attention-driven economy, this is a fairly fundamental question. For any product or service to do well, it has to attract attention. More and more, this attention has to be bought in one way or another. To make the right attention buying decisions, one has to have some notion of what attention is worth.
Eye (by Andrew James McNulty)
A few recent “market valuations” give fairly direct hints about the value of attention. The most recent valuation was the large investment, about $180 million, in a “social gaming” company. The company is private and secretive about revenues, but they do like to mention the size of their user base. Apparently, they have about 60 million “active” users. It’s hard to tell what percentage of the company this investment has bought. Let’s be generous and say 15%, that values the company at about $1.2 billion. So in this online social entertainment business, a pair of eyeballs is worth about 20 dollars. Another relevant piece of public information about this situation is that only 3% to 4% of this user base actually spends any money and the amounts being spent per month are small (less that three figures).
It would be interesting to push this exercise and guesstimate eyeball values for different kinds of businesses and contexts, especially how “engaged” the eyeballs are and how much the attached brains spend. But already it tells us something about how much it makes sense to spend on buying attention. If you can get 3% or so conversion and $20 or so per month in expenditure, it makes sense to spend a fair amount on acquiring those eyeballs. This is a little counter-intuitive given the current craze about “free viral and social” advertising. Of course, this bodes well for those who already have the eyeballs (ad inventory and distribution channels); if the trend holds, they can sell at a premium.
