 How to monetize your attention
Problem The problem is that people lose a lot of time because of someone else’s initiative. The perfect example is reading e-mails and the spam issue. We can try to regulate and ban mass mailings. However, there is a possibility to eliminate the problem using peaceful economic measures. Solution The idea is that if you want people to devote some time to your message, you have to pay for the time spent. The addressee set a reward for opening a letter, for a number of characters or for inquiry duration. To highlight the importance, it’s possible to pay more than the addressee asks. First step At the first step, a server is created. It allows anyone to connect their e-mail in four clicks. When sending a letter to such an addressee, the sender receives a warning that the addressee’s attention is payable and a link to make a quick payment is provided. The system operates as a gateway to which letters come and are sent to the addressee if the services have been paid. Advertisers will invest almost all money in the system while ordinary users will constantly receive a small profit. Next step At the next steps, we’ll connect telephony, messengers, and so on. The system will allow users all over the world to provide various paid services with a convenient payment method. The project of this scale is worth to start an ICO campaign. Imagine a currency backed up by attention as a resource. How I reason about the places where it’s worth looking for money, assessing the willingness to pay and total amounts: Consumers value their emotions over everything else. Spending less time for reading useless appeals means less unpleasant emotions. It’s always a pleasure to get money. You can set the price for being addressed and never again hide your email address from spammers. Someone else’s attention is the most valuable thing for suppliers. People are ready to pay a lot for receiving access to the necessary person. Some of them may even send themselves the requests and get a good excuse for their money source. The majority of messages are of a greater significance for a sender than for an addressee. That means they will pay for reading their letters. How much is attention? If the user gets the letter, at least the title will be read. It takes 10 seconds to read a message consisting of 20 words. If you get 1 cent for reading such a message, it corresponds to the income of 600 Euros per month. The advertiser pays more than 1 cent for a single demonstration on TV. So, 1 cent can be taken as a minimum price for a targeted message. Every day 250 billion letters are sent. Competitor In April 2018, the Coinbase acquired the Earn.com startup for an estimated 100 million dollars. Earn.com has a complicated registration procedure. You must confirm your identity, professional expertise and you are obliged to answer the message. I believe this to be a needless condition since the viewed message itself already has a value for the sender. If advertisers write messages to a certain e-mail address, they have to know who they write to, so there is no need to complicate the system. Social significance Annual world advertising budget is 500 billions. The advertiser needs the viewer’s attention, but viewers don’t receive compensation. The paid message system provides a sense of justice because it compensates for what is not pleasant. People will receive this money not from government, but from product producers and service providers. This is a market process dealing with socially meaningful redistribution of resources. Time economy The average wage in the world is 1,400 Euros per month (Global wage calculator Money.cnn.com). If the average person has spent 7 minutes writing a letter, they have already lost 1 Euro. Will you be mean about another Euro just make sure your message won’t be left unattended? On the other hand, if the letter sender is not ready to pay 1 Euro for your attention, then, maybe, their message makes no difference? Within the PayAttention project, the time and opinion of any individual acquires a monetary value. Busy people will request more money for their attention. Those who need a constant income will get more messages at a lower price. The amount of money received in the PayAttention system will show the person’s importance for the society. This can become one of the objective factors used to assess the experts ranking. The habit to mark time not in minutes but in Euros makes people appreciate someone else’s time as well. For example, draftsmen who work on different contracts don’t value the client’s time. You’ve probably had the experience to order cheap services, coming along with such a contract you cannot read up to the end.
Monetize your time and people will start learning to express themselves laconically!
Aleksey Zaitsevsky, 2018, PayAttention.me |