Whose Asset Does a Viral Post Become?

Introduction: What Happens After It Spreads

How to make something spread, and how to write posts people share, are already well documented. What this article takes up is what happens afterwards. Once it has been carried far, where does that attention accumulate?

Techniques are discussed endlessly, and one question is rarely asked: who ultimately collects the attention that a viral post gathered.

Here is the conclusion first. Spreading is the work of collecting a product called attention — and the one who sells that product is not you, who collected it, but the place. What you supply is not the product but the raw material from which the product is made.

The Scarce Thing Is Attention, Not Information

Start from the principle of this market.

Writing about a society saturated with information, the economist and cognitive scientist Herbert Simon made a sharp observation [Simon, 1971]. Put plainly: an abundance of information means that information consumes something. What it consumes is the attention of whoever receives it. So in a world of excess information, the scarce resource is not information but human attention.

The observation looks obvious and changes how the world appears. We normally assume that valuable information will draw people to it — that information is the scarce, valuable thing. Simon’s point runs the other way.

And on reflection it is plainly true. However good the piece you wrote today, countless people are publishing countless pieces in the same hours. Information is supplied without limit. Meanwhile the total attention any one person can direct in a day is strictly bounded. So what gets fought over is the attention.

Tim Wu later gathered the history of the business of collecting attention and selling it into a single book [Wu, 2016]. Collect attention, sell it to those who need it — a trade that existed in the eras of newspapers and broadcast, now conducted with far greater precision.

Three Parties — and Where You Are

Sort the market by its cast and the structure becomes plain.

The first party is the platform. It runs the place where attention gathers and earns by selling that attention as a product.

The second party is the advertiser. It wants to sell its own goods, needs attention to do so, and pays to buy the attention that has gathered.

Already something important is visible. The platform’s product is people’s attention. Its customer is the advertiser who buys that attention.

So where is the third party — you, the publisher?

You may feel like the customer. Or like the supplier of the product. Neither. The paying customer is the advertiser; the product being sold is people’s attention. You are not either of them.

Your role is this. You supply, free of charge, the content that draws people’s attention in. When your post spreads, people gather to see it, and the platform sells that gathered attention as advertising. The content that spread is the raw material from which attention is collected and sold.

And for that raw material, nothing is paid. The one who converts the attention you gathered into revenue is not you.

Television Had Already Completed This

If the three-party structure feels abstract, apply it to something closer at hand: commercial television. The template for the attention economy was completed in the living room long before any of this.

Watching commercial television, we feel like the viewer — the customer — being entertained for free. Open the broadcaster’s business and the structure is entirely different. The real customer was never the viewer. It was the sponsor. The broadcaster gathers viewers’ attention, bundles it as ratings, and sells it. The programme is not the product but the bait that draws attention in.

You can watch for free not because you are the customer but because your attention is the product the broadcaster sells to the sponsor.

So where is the decisive difference between television and what happens now? Here the core appears. On television, the bait — the programme — was made by the broadcaster. It paid for production. The cost of the bait was carried by the side selling attention.

Now it is not. The bait that draws attention is not made by the operator. It is made by you. The production cost that a broadcaster carried itself is now carried, unpaid, by countless publishers. That is the coldest single point of difference. You occupy the position of a programme maker without a fee.

Why the Structure Has Become Invisible

Said plainly it is obvious — so why did I never notice? Because the structure is carefully covered over.

Operators do not call you a supplier of raw material. They call you a creator, an influencer, a publisher. These names make you feel like a principal in the market: someone producing, influencing, acting.

And in practice, a range of mechanisms exists to keep you comfortable, absorbed, publishing. The pleasure of a reaction. The satisfaction of a rising follower count. Sometimes a route to revenue. All of it exists so that the supply of raw material continues voluntarily and gladly.

While you feel like a principal, you experience unpaid supply not as labour but as self-realisation. That is exactly why it continues. And why the structure stays invisible.

Were an operator to say honestly you are producing content as unpaid raw material for us, this many people would not publish this eagerly. That the structure remains invisible is the market’s most important operating condition.

Ask Where It Accumulates, Not How Far It Spreads

Seen this way, the question about spreading changes.

How do I make things spread is a question about increasing supply. Keep answering it and your position within this structure cannot change. You become a supplier of raw material who is good at supplying.

The question worth asking is where do I accumulate the attention that spreading gathered, and the relationships it created? Leave them in the place where they spread and they remain borrowed — distribution still held by someone else. Move them into a path that reaches readers directly and they become an owned asset.

To be clear: this is not an argument against seeking spread. As an entrance where readers first meet you, it remains useful. What changes is not the entrance but where the relationship is stored.

Conclusion: Look at the Collection Point, Not the Volume

Spreading is neither good nor bad in itself. It becomes a problem when you keep increasing supply without ever asking whose asset accumulates at the far end.

The position you occupy is that of the furthest, most numerous, unpaid supplier in a market where attention is sold as a product. And the way out of that position is not to supply more skilfully.

The whole picture is gathered in why blogging longer leaves less of your own voice. On whose revenue the gathered attention becomes, see who actually earns from blog monetisation?; on moving where it accumulates, why newsletters are called outdated, and the one thing that remains.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Simon, H. A. “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World” in Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest (1971) Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 37–72

Books

• Wu, T. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (2016) Knopf
• Zuboff, S. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) PublicAffairs