Attention and dollars are not interchangeable currencies. There are conditions on how we can turn our time into money. And yet, much of the digital industry treats attention and dollars as the same. Yes, where there is attention there is usually the potential for dollars, but not always.
It’s a common human mistake to ignore or underestimate the distance between potential and realization. The advertising industry has been convincing business for decades that they know how far that distance is, but nobody knows for sure. The digital age continues to bring more examples of that gap being bridged, but we aren’t close enough to having a true understanding to be treating attention and dollars as interchangeable.
