A model of how to monetize the attention economy

We've all been trying to calculate the value of advertising: views, clickthroughs, and lately, and vaguely, "engagement." But on social networks, ads don't seem to be working as well as they do on Google, where they're really part of the content, and relate directly to the user's intent. So along comes Adam Penenberg in his new book The Viral Loop, excerpted here in Fast Company, and modeled in an app for Facebook and iPhone. Estimate the value of each user to Facebook by how active they are, reveal that dollar figure so now I am motivated to try to raise it -- and then maybe together we can all pressure Facebook to share some of it back with us. Esther Dyson wrote about the attention economy a decade ago, and proposed that it should be worth it to companies to share it back with us, but I think this is the best attempt to do it in a long time, if ever. Check it out. My starting value on Facebook is $64.80. What's yours?

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Does this list of hot startups inspire or depress you?

Inspire, because if there are these many good ideas, there's got to be one more...Or depress, because it seems like someone, and probably a team with a connection to venture money, got there first.

I'm in the former camp. Besides, maybe some of them are hiring!

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"Your blog is your mothership"

By way of customizable news-gatherer socialmedian.com, from WebWorkerDaily.com comes this sage advice from yet another link (but you'll have to find it by going to the WWD link): Don't neglect your blog for lesser tools.

EU study: 20% might pay for content online

George Gilder promised and heralded it; the authors of "Blown to Bits" and "The Innovators Dilemma" warned about it close to ten years ago now; Chris Anderson has explained it in "The Long Tail" and now in "Free:" When the cost of a product and service decline rapidly, a couple of things are pretty likely to happen: new players will enter the market, unburdened by legacy cost structures and business practices (including past success); prices will fall, incumbents will suffer, and new business models will emerge. Nowhere has this been more dramatic and public than in the media industries I've worked in and around for almost all of my careers: books, music and movie delivery (MTV, Showtime, Movie Channel); consumer electronics (remember the Sony Walkman?); subscription newsletter; newspapers... Two items today are only the most recent among many to address this: Jeremiah Owyang's commentary on the first Cisco Eos contract with the big Hollywood media brands: http://bit.ly/ynaV3 and the European Union's large survey and report that, among other things, notes that P2P technology is not the reason media companies have lost sales. As I tweeted a few minutes ago, it's the business model, stupid (thanks to James Carville for the appropriation).

Great market opportunity: Two-thirds of Young People in EC might pay...

A new study has the wrong end of the stick as its headline: "Third of Young People Won't Pay for Online Content."  More good news in the study, throughout, but remember, in this paidcontent summary, to take the other side of each statistic.

E-marketers confess they don't test email campaigns

Very sad news, since it is easy to test, and you get results very quickly. It's a foundation of the innovator's best practice of "fail fast." From directmag: http://tr.im/utPh

The end of "command" for corporations

CIOZone published a review of the state of social media, itself reviewed in corporateeye.com and linked to linkedin.com -- illustrating how things travel. Here's the key quote: “'Like the fall of the Berlin Wall, many observers say we are witnessing the collapse of the command-and-control power of corporate mass marketing.'"

"That’s a much bigger message than 'you can’t afford to ignore Twitter.' That’s the end of the world as we know it."