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2007/03/26 17:28
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My good friend Taewoo Danny Kim is planning a trip to the US to do interviews with some ??쏛-list bloggers??? and other well-kno.
Few weeks ago, I was contacted by a foreign (i.e. non-Korean) startup company. This company is a pretty famous one in the Web 2.0 space as you can see its name come up relatively often on TechCrunch, ReadWrtieWeb, ZDNet and others. It's even ranked somewhere around 500 by Alexa. What they wanted was to make a move into the Korean market; since they don't know too much about the culture in Asia or the Korean market, they were hoping to find someone who could feed them with a research on those subjects. They had been looking for the right person for the task and concluded that I was "the right person" and contacted me.
Ok, enough with self-flattery. Hehe.
What was actually interesting about their proposal was the part they mentioned about the reward for doing the research. They basically said,
"After you perform the research, we??셪l add a link to your blog/feed on our homepage."
This was the "reward" they were talking about. At first, I thought, "What the heck? Are they even serious about doing business at all?" But immediately I realized that the way they were doing this was probably one of the most advanced methods for doing business.
As the territory of attention economy grows on the Web, links are the most certain way to distribute and allocate attention, a resource and an asset in this economic system. Want an example? Look no further than Google AdSense.
There is most certainly a gap between attention economy and money economy. Currently, the links or conversion between the two economies are very weak and limited. What does that mean? There's only so many ways to make money off attention. These are 1) ads, 2) being sold to a company which already has a way to make money off something else, or 3) use all the attention one receives somewhere else to make money. Some examples of doing the third method are becoming famous and getting a better job somewhere, writing books, doing seminars/lectures, or acting as a commercial model for something related to the kind of attention that person is receiving. Especially in Korea where reputation often beats quality (which aren't necessarily closely related), the third method might be a great way to be rewarded financially.
I think that celebrities are the ones that know the dynamics of attention economy best. They live by it and live in it. The amount of attention they receive determines how successful they are. This is why we often see totally bogus reports about some not-so-famous celebrities on papers and stuff: THEY WANT TO RECEIVE ATTENTION! Especially, as we move deeper into the digital era, it's becoming harder for them to make money directly off their primary jobs (selling albums, concert revenues, acting in movies and dramas). This consequently makes them more reliant on indirect income channels such as showing up on commercials--this isn't necessarily true outside of Korea. They'd do anything to get exposed more to viewers by even losing their core identities. (Is she a singer? an actor? an professional emcee? a model?) Those who receive much attention make millions of dollars a year, mostly through commercials--again, in Korea.
In this context, Slashdot/Digg/TechCrunch effects are economically real. They do bring economic consequences. As individual bloggers grow more influential, they'll have to become more careful about where to make links to. Putting a link to another site means that you're transferring your attention to that site, which in turn implies you could be transferring some of your own money along with it.
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2007/07/14 14:08
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2007/09/01 22:31
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