How Blockchain Technology Can Monetize User Attention

Attention is a resource of limited supply. Each of us only has so much attention to offer, making our time precious to us. Outside of the workplace however, our attention is rarely compensated with hard cash. On social media, gaming sites, and content delivery platforms of all shapes and sizes our ‘payment’ comes in the form of knowledge or entertainment. 

In this model the creator offers content, the consumer trades their attention and in most cases everything is paid for with advertising. What if however, human attention could be directly compensated, and both consumers and creators could win?

Something New

This idea of an ‘attention economy’ is nothing new. The idea was first posited in 1969 by Herbert A. Simon who must surely have been ahead of his time. Describing attention as an economic force he said: “Now when we speak of an information-rich world, we may expect, analogically, that the wealth of information means a dearth of something else — a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

Now, thanks to Gather, the attention economy is set for a 21st century upgrade. Using Gather’s cloud computing technology, visitors to a website (such as a gaming platform or streaming site) can lend a little more than their attention alone. Upon visiting a Gather-enabled website the user is first asked if they wish to opt-in to the Gather network. If they choose to do so, the spare computational power of their system joins Gather to be used for a range of easily monetized applications.

One such use case might be to mine Gather’s own native currency GTH, but there are a myriad of other potential uses for this resource. Cloud computing is a growth area with the market size of the global cloud computing industry expected to grow from $371.4 billion in 2020 to $832.1 billion by 2025. The global demand for computational power is massive, and interest in the sector continues to grow.

Scaling Up

By linking user attention and computational power, content creators can tap into a highly lucrative market with the benefits of scaling for sites which keep users most hooked. When compared to monetization through advertising, the profitability of Gather improves with longevity of use. For example, a 30 minute session on a Gather-enabled site may be 20 times more profitable for its owner than advertising revenue, and 40 times more profitable for a one hour session. This is because there is a limit to how many adverts a site can deliver its users in any one visit, while Gather can operate unobtrusively at all times.

Such a highly impressive and scalable revenue model may explain why Gather has already won over more than 350 online businesses into their cloud computing scheme, including one $4 billion dollar mega corporation. The company has also won backing from some major VC players including Bitscale Capital, LD Capital, TRG Capital and Master Ventures.

With lockdown creating even more reasons for people to seek ways to spend their time, Gather’s monetizable cloud computing model certainly merits greater attention.

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