The importance of Return on Attention

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the impact of Search Engines, and specifically Search Marketing, on the Web. Some people have asserted that Search Engines are “leeches”, feeding off of other people’s hard work. Others have defended Search Engines as wholly beneficial to the vast collection of web publishers, providing an income and distribution source that they otherwise would not have.

This discussion got me thinking about the real incentives provided by Pay-Per-Click Search Marketing. Nick Carr touches on this in a recent post:

“The economic incentive for the content producer therefore is not to produce content that simply engages a large or demographically attractive audience, but to produce content that (a) attracts an audience likely to click on a valuable advertising link and (b) increases the odds that such lucrative clicks will actually happen.”

This is an important point – these incentives are real, and can lead to two outcomes for content providers:

1 – Content providers change the type of content they provide to get a more valuable audience (for example, emphasizing product reviews instead of how-to articles)

2 – Content providers change the content of what they publish to more explicitly steer consumers to click on advertising. For example, writing good product reviews for marginal products, or writing articles with integrated “product placement”.

In either event, the safeguards that traditional publishers have had in place for years to minimize the impact of advertising on editorial content will not exist.
This is where Return on Attention comes in. If we can measure Return on Attention, we start to give consumers more control. How?

First, feedback. By letting other people know how valuable you found a site, you are strengthening the quality of the content (not in a News Hour with Jim Lehrer way, but perhaps in an audience-friendly Fox News way).

Second, quality. With click fraud and rising keyword prices, advertisers will start to demand and seek out high quality lead flow, not just a high quantity of leads. In other words, they will start to reward sites that send them eventual customers, not sites that send them leads.

In a world focused on clicks, all that matters is getting the click. Advertisers and search engines have become very skilled at increasing clickthrough rates on their ads. However, that results in low quality leads. The coming focus on high quality (but perhaps lower volume) leads is a disruptive change for the market. Return on Attention is the critical guide to success for publishers. Focusing on Return on Attention – and therefore focusing on quality content – will yield the greatest return on online publishing assets in this new environment.