In many respects, “attention” is completely different from grain and chickens. After all, chickens and grain are real, tangible objects. Attention is bafflingly abstract. It exists for a moment and then drifts somewhere else. Chickens have certain clear, measurable attributes. They can be old or young, sick or healthy, egg producing or not egg producing. Attention is a bit harder to quantify and measure.
But despite these differences, the maturation of the online marketplace for attention closely mirrors the development of our hypothetical chicken marketplace. In a predigital advertising economy, local newspapers sold space on their pages to generate revenue. Most of the time, that space was purchased by businesses wishing to advertise goods and services. Like the island chicken farmer, the local newspaper sold its space to local businesses and organizations, and negotiated these deals on a bespoke basis.
But, as with chickens, this artisanal process for buying and selling attention is cumbersome at scale. Facebook serves an astronomically larger number of advertisements than a mid-twentieth-century local newspaper. It also has a vastly broader pool of potential advertisers, from massive companies promoting their latest product to a community group fundraising for the local marching band. Scale introduces the same pressures to the attention market that we saw in our hypothetical chicken market. In order to buy and sell attention across a vast number of players with very different needs, it becomes necessary to standardize what is being sold.
We need a Standard Chicken Lot for our attention market. The search for this standard rapidly reaches into the realm of the philosophical. Can we measure attention in a simple and reliable way? Can we break human attention down into discrete units that can be exchanged in a marketplace?
The advertising industry is deeply invested in answering these questions in the affirmative. In 1996, industry leaders formed the Internet Advertising Bureau (later renamed the Interactive Advertising Bureau, or IAB), a private consortium dedicated to developing the standards that enable the online advertising market to function.39 In 2004, the IAB published its “Ad Impression Measurement Guidelines,” an initial set of foundational standards by which an ad is considered “delivered” to a consumer by the industry.40
The battles over these standard definitions have been fierce, because they define the terms under which advertisers pay for online ads and how they measure their success. For instance, we might say an ad has been “delivered” when it is successfully loaded up on a website. That definition has the advantage of being extremely easy to measure: an ad server can log that it sent an ad, and the website can confirm that the ad has been displayed. But assuming this definition as the bar for success might massively overreport the amount of attention that an ad is capturing. What if the ad is loaded, but is buried in a place on the website where no one ever sees it? Tons of ads could be “successfully delivered” under this metric without reaching anyone.
We might try to raise the bar by only counting an ad as “successfully delivered” when a user pauses on the ad and actually looks at it for a period of time. But how long do users need to pause on the ad? How can we verify that they are looking at it? Setting the threshold for success too high creates new problems—by defining the attention asset so narrowly, we risk overly constraining the market. Publishers might end up with real attention they are unable to sell because the standards for measuring and verifying it are too stringent.
Much of the IAB’s work focuses on building consensus in answering these fundamental line-drawing questions: the organization has brought together numerous working groups that create and update guidelines specifying what constitutes a measurable blob of attention.
Like the standards for soybeans or corn, attention standards can be impressively specific. In 2014, the group released an extension of its 2004 work that standardized the concept of a “viewable impression.” To achieve a viewable impression, more than 50 percent of the pixels in an advertisement must occupy the viewable space of a browser page for greater than or equal to one continuous second after the advertising renders.41 The IAB specifies that “satisfying the minimum pixel requirement should precede the measurement of the time duration; for example, the clock starts on determining whether the ad meets the one continuous second time requirement only when the ad is determined to have met the 50% pixel threshold.”42 Numerous other standards define other aspects of the ad delivery process, from guidelines on the placement of an ad on the page to a commonly recognized set of formats for displaying an ad.43
The implications of this standardization effort are profound. Commodification enables a fluid marketplace. The amorphous, shapeless concept of attention has been transformed into discrete, comparable pieces that can be captured, priced, and sold. Buyers and sellers can quickly evaluate opportunities and transact in attention at massive scale, without individually evaluating each opportunity.
Standardization has made attention an abstract, economic asset as well. It is now possible to purchase attention in the marketplaces without knowing where and how that attention was produced. The idea is to enable the capture of a desired amount of attention at a minimum cost. As with standard units like “No. 1 Spring Corn” and the SCL, the modern programmatic advertising marketplace makes attention an interchangeable asset.
The commodification of attention in the 2000s created a fertile environment for market automation, something that was not possible in the Chicago grain markets of the 1850s. The industry definition of an impression is rigid and measurable, making impressions highly amenable to computerization. The existing infrastructure allows anyone to set up an advertiser account on an ad exchange and start buying and selling attention algorithmically with a global pool of willing counterparties. No special expertise or industry connections are required.
The overall impact of this seamless transacting and automation is obvious. In the same way that the standardization and automation
