Trust is the New Oil

From the Attention Economy to the Action Economy

Source: ChatGPT 4o.

A few weeks ago, I floated a half-baked idea during a presentation: “in the age of AI, trust is the new oil.” The more I bake it, the more I believe this phrase captures the possibility that AI will re-order the media economy as we know it. In many ways, it also points to a hopeful future, even for traditional media.

In this post, I’ll explain why.

Tl;dr:

• For the last 25 years, the foundation of the web economy has been the monetization of attention.

• That has funded a vast amount of content, but the zero-sum competition for our finite attention has a dark side too: sponsored links that are a diversion or a tax; apps and sites that manipulate our neurophysiology to hook us; content that is clickbait, ragebait, polarizing, and false; and unwelcome surveillance online.

• There are also signs we are in the late stages of strip-mining attention and nearing a breaking point.

• Here comes AI. It will likely devalue raw attention for two reasons: as creation costs fall, increasing noise will drown out signal on open platforms, such as the open web and social networks (despite platforms’ attempts to counteract it); and consumers will increasingly use agents and bots to manage it.

• In turn, this will likely weigh on digital advertising. All that noise will degrade the value of impressions and the quality of data, especially at the top of the funnel. The rise of agents and bots may render many ads worthless—and not just on the open web, but even some social impressions and retail media traffic.

• The big question: how does the web economy adjust? It will likely shift from an attention economy to an action economy, from one built on potential energy to kinetic energy.

• The declining value of attention will be accompanied by increasing value of trust. Consumers are far more likely to act—or, eventually, empower their agents to act—when they trust the source. Just as data was the oil that fueled the attention economy, trust will be the oil that fuels the action economy.

• There are two kinds of trust online: signal-based trust and earned trust. The former is easy to game, but the latter must be established and reinforced over time.

• A web economy built on earned trust would look very different from what exists today. Among the implications: the value of human curation would rise as algorithms struggle to manage the noise; discovery would shift back from algorithmically-curated feeds to trusted follows; similarly, consumers would lean more on institutions with trusted brands; it would be harder for new creators and brands to establish trust; and advertisers would shift from paying for attention to paying for outcomes.

• The fight for attention won’t ever fully go away and, with it, its negative consequences. But, on the margin, attention alone will become less profitable. That could shift both incentives and the balance of power online.

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Why Attention Became the Primary Currency

We’re so accustomed to paying for content with our attention that we don’t think about it. But it didn’t have to be this way.

The web was built on open protocols. TCP/IP for routing and delivery of packets, HTML for rendering web pages, HTTP for links between pages, SMTP for delivering mail between servers, etc. For a variety of reasons, however, there weren’t protocols for things that, in hindsight, would’ve been very useful, like payments or verified identity. Perhaps that’s because the web wasn’t initially intended to support commercial activity (the National Science Foundation (NSFNET) initially prohibited it) and the early web community prioritized privacy and anonymity over verified identity. The reasons don’t matter much.

In the absence of “rails” for native payments and identity—what Ethan Zuckerman called the “original sin of the internet” over a decade ago—the only viable model to support content creation was advertising: capture consumers’ attention and charge advertisers for the right to access some of it.

Today, while the internet supports subscriptions and commerce, almost every site and app is either partially or entirely advertising supported. Globally, digital advertising is a ~$750 billion business, representing 70% of all advertising spend—which is to say that it is more than twice as large as TV, print, radio, outdoor, and every other type of advertising combined (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Digital Dominates Global Advertising

Source: WPP, The Mediator.

The Problem With Attention

In some ways, advertising serves the public interest. It finances a vast amount of content that is available for “free.” When video and audio streaming services, games, and podcasts offer consumers the option of receiving ads in exchange for paying less or nothing (i.e., by offering ad-supported and more expensive ad-free tiers), many happily take the ad-supported choice.

It is increasingly clear that the battle for a finite amount of attention is at odds with consumer welfare.

It is increasingly clear, however, that this zero-sum competition to capture a finite amount of consumer attention—the so-called “attention economy”—puts the interests of ad-supported platforms and content creators at odds with public welfare.

• Sponsored results are either a diversion or a tax. Consumers go to Google Search to find the best sources of information. Google’s interests are misaligned with that goal. It makes money by inserting sponsored search ads that often displace the most relevant organic results. When these sponsored results are the best source, that’s because the advertiser felt compelled to purchase the relevant keyword(s) to pre-empt competitors, which effectively raises costs for consumers. The same principle applies to sponsored results on Amazon or any retail media.

• Product design is often manipulative. Social platforms hack our neurophysiology to increase time spent, often at the expense of consumers’ well being. They use tactics like variable reward schedules (so-called “dopamine loops”), gamification, notifications to draw consumers back in, infinite scroll, etc.

• The monetization of attention rewards sensational, enraging, polarizing, false content. This battle for attention encourages creators (professionals and otherwise) to produce sensational, polarizing, false, and clickbait content. And since this kind of emotion-baiting stuff tends to draw more attention, the platforms’ algorithms amplify it.

• Privacy is collateral damage. To facilitate all this advertising, platforms and publishers collect all kinds of data about users: clickstream, location, behavioral, demographic, and economic—giving rise to another pejorative description of the web, “the surveillance economy.” Technically, users usually consent to this data collection, but it is often buried in massive terms and conditions that are onerous to read. Many feel that this “surveillance” is a violation of privacy that they had little practical ability to refuse.

Whether you call it the attention economy or the surveillance economy, many agree that this state of affairs is not good. It arguably isn’t good for mental health (especially young people); public civility; political discourse; and trust in information ecosystems.

It may also be unsustainable. Culturally, there are already signs that we are being pushed to the brink. You can see evidence of backlash everywhere: “digital detox” movements; the rise of minimalist phones and digital hacks to limit screen time; memes about digital burnout and doom-scrolling; subtle rejection of modernity by younger consumers (who are embracing vinyl, film cameras, and vintage shopping); and, thanks to efforts by people like social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, a broader push to ban phones in school.