How Attention is the New Currency for Influencers

The first rule of economics is that scarcity drives value. Gold is expensive because there is not much of it. Attention works the same way. Every person on earth has exactly 24 hours in a day. Every hour you spend watching a creator is an hour you are not spending watching someone else. That finite pool of human attention is the resource every influencer, media company, and platform is fighting over.

Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, saw this coming in 1971, long before social media existed. He argued that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. The more content there is, the more valuable your attention becomes. Today, with billions of videos and posts flooding the internet daily, your attention is rarer and worth more than ever.

How Attention Converts to Cash

Attention on its own does not pay rent. But it converts into money through a simple pipeline. An influencer captures your attention. Platforms like YouTube or Instagram measure that attention in views and watch time. Advertisers pay to place their message inside that captured attention. The influencer gets paid. It is a three-sided market where the audience pays with time, the advertiser pays with dollars, and the platform takes a cut in the middle.

Content Inflation is Real

Like any currency, attention is subject to inflation. When every brand and small business floods the market with content, the supply of content grows while the supply of attention stays fixed. Each individual post gets a smaller share of available attention, which is why going viral gets harder every year even as production quality improves.

The most economically durable influencers are not those with the most followers. They are those whose audience would follow them anywhere, through any platform shift or algorithm change. That loyal community is the true store of value, because it cannot be easily copied by competitors.

The Costs Nobody Talks About

Platforms are economically incentivized to maximize engagement, which means serving content that triggers strong emotional reactions. Outrage and controversy are engagement gold mines. The economic logic is perfect; the human consequences can be damaging. For influencers themselves, the moment you stop posting, your attention stock depreciates fast. Attention earned yesterday evaporates by tomorrow. It is the most perishable currency ever invented, and it is why burnout is the defining hazard of the profession.

What This Means For You

Every time you open an app, you are entering a market. Your attention is the product being sold. The feed you scroll is not designed to inform you. It is designed to extract the maximum amount of your attention for the maximum economic return. Spend your attention the way a smart investor spends money: deliberately, on things that return value to you, not just to the platform.