Attention and Value of Online Indexes

An online index becomes valuable proportionally to the amount of attention it receives.

Online indexes:

  • search results
  • app store listings
  • news sites homepages
  • reddit subreddits
  • social media streams

Because of attention that gives value to an index, the entity that controls the index of can extract monetary value by selling access to this index. A good example of this is Google Adwords model. Google crawls the web and indexes the websites. When users enter the query Google provides a customised index in response to users query, and allows advertisers to bid for space in that index.

In web 2.0 model we use various non-monetary currencies to measure flows of attention - clicks, page impressions, video views, votes, likes etc.

Attention flows on the Internet and is transferred via indexes owned by various platforms.

Example: Users clicks on a search result (index generated by Google from their proprietary data) and gets transferred to a Reddit index (generated from Reddit's proprietary data). Users scans the reddit site and clicks on the link which takes him to a Wordpress blog (which again is an index of data, generated from a self-hosted Wordpress database)

Each online index is a 'traffic source' for the next index. Each index's value can be measured by attention that flows through it.

We can now have direct monetary representation of value in the online indexes - Web 3.0

Even though attention equals value, this relationship has been indirect so far, as money and attention had to travel on separate networks.

Money is exchanged on the financial networks which are separate from the internet (where attention is exchanged). Because of this, 'attention currencies' were only an indirect representation of monetary value.

The process of 'monetisation' is usually performed via advertising or product sales. Because 'attention value' and 'monetary value' flow on different networks we need separate currencies and intermediaries to perform the exchanges.

The entire ad-tech industry delivers tools to optimize these exchanges between 'attention currencies' and 'monetary currencies'.

In the web 3.0 model, enabled the blockchain and smart contracts, we can for the first time in history, have money and attention be stored in the same index.