A short history of paying to be noticed

For most of history, getting noticed was simple. Not easy. Simple.

You put a sign in the window.

The drugstore on the corner knew exactly what it was buying: a good spot on a busy street, a hand-lettered card, maybe an ad in Thursday's paper. Whether it worked showed up in the cash register by Saturday. The thing that got attention and the thing that measured it sat about ten feet apart.

Every era since has changed three things. How you get attention. What it costs. How you know it worked. Follow those three and you get the story of modern media, and a question nobody has fully answered yet.

Print: buying space somebody else counted

Newspapers and magazines sold you space next to their readers. The trouble was proving the readers existed. Publishers inflated their circulation, advertisers suspected it, and in 1914 the industry set up the Audit Bureau of Circulations to count copies independently.

That was the first rule of the attention business. We'll pay. Someone neutral has to count.

Radio and three-channel TV: renting from a gatekeeper

In 1922, a real estate company paid New York station WEAF to air ten minutes about apartments in Queens, and radio advertising was born. In 1941, Bulova paid $9 for a few seconds before a baseball game on WNBT, the first legal TV commercial in America.

Then the gates closed around three networks. For decades, roughly nine in ten prime-time viewers were watching ABC, CBS or NBC. If you wanted national attention, you rented it from one of them. It was expensive. It was also knowable.

Nielsen began rating television in 1950, and for a generation the business ran on one shared number. You paid the price, the ratings told you what you got, and everyone argued from the same scoreboard.

Cable: attention splits into slivers

Cable pried the gates open. ESPN arrived in 1979, CNN in 1980, and by 1992 the industry was talking about a 500-channel universe.

Attention got cheaper and narrower. You could reach golf fans or cooking fans without paying for everyone else. But every slice was thinner, and the ratings got shakier as audiences spread out. The scoreboard still existed. Fewer people trusted it.

The feed: anyone can take it

Then the gatekeepers stopped being the only way in.

Today a teenager with a phone can out-draw a network for an afternoon. A brand can get a week of national attention from a new logo. A stranger can become famous by saying the most outrageous thing in the room, because the feed rewards whatever keeps people watching, and outrage keeps people watching.

Attention used to be scarce and priced. Now it's abundant and cheap to spike. That sounds like good news for anyone trying to be noticed, until you realize that when anyone can grab a moment, a moment proves very little.

The measures didn't keep up either. Likes, views and followers are counted by the same platforms that sell ads against them. There's no shared standard, and plenty of them can be bought.

Bad news, then and now

Negative attention isn't new. "If it bleeds, it leads" was a newsroom rule long before the internet.

What changed is the speed, and who holds the match.

When bad news traveled by newspaper, it moved at the speed of the next edition, and an editor decided whether it ran. The evening news gave it a nightly slot. Cable gave it 24 hours to fill. The feed handed it to everyone, along with an algorithm that pushes a story further the angrier it makes people.

The research is blunt. A 2018 MIT study in Science found false news on Twitter was 70% more likely to be shared than true news, and true stories took about six times as long to reach the same number of people. A 2017 study in PNAS found that each moral or emotional word in a post raised its spread by about 20%.

Our own index shows the same thing in business. When brands changed their names and logos, the biggest spikes we measured didn't come from the change. They came from the backlash.

How attention worked, era by era

Each era eventually got its own measuring stick. Audited circulation for print. Ratings for broadcast. This one doesn't have a shared one yet. It has a hundred dashboards, each counting its own platform.

So does attention still matter?

That's the question now. When attention can be grabbed in an afternoon and gone by the weekend, is it worth paying for? When it turns against you, how much does it cost? When everyone is shouting, how do you know whether anyone turned toward you?

That's what we set out to measure. Not likes, and not impressions somebody paid for, but people going looking for something on their own, every day, ranked against everything else in its category, across sports, TV, music, Broadway, brands and more.

Next: Attention costs money. Here's how to tell if it's working.