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.

From the AttentionTrust blog today:

” …Two of her [Elizabeth Lawley] comments really stood out for me. First:

Syndicated subscriptions are an attention filter… There are students of mine, colleagues of mine, who would love to be able to subscribe to my attention filter. ‘What is Liz reading?’

… Something implicit in Liz’s comment–and something I know Steve will discuss–is the importance of inattention. If I’m interested in knowing what Liz is reading (and I am), I’m just as interested in knowing what she’s NOT reading. “Attention filters” will help us find the good stuff and avoid the dreck, using attention data generated by us, our friends and colleagues, and although syndicated subscriptions are moving us in the right direction, we have a long way to go.

Liz was also careful to draw an important distinction between social networks and “attention networks,” and she posed a compelling question:

How do we meld attention networks with search?

This becomes a huge question when we start thinking about how “attention filters” might evolve. For example, my blogroll is a simple attention filter that gives you a very general sense of the issues that interest me, but it won’t tell you which authors I read the most, let alone which individual posts are most relevant to my interests.”

Hinted at in this entry is the concept of context. You want to know not only WHAT someone is reading, you want to know WHY someone is reading it and how much they LIKED it. In other words, you want to know a) was this worthy of their attention?; and b) did they get a good Return on Attention?

Simply capturing clickstreams cannot give you the context. But to make the concept of Attention Filters practical, we need to get to that level. Data without context doesn’t have meaning.

Couldn’t say it better myself, so I figured I would just alert everyone to jd’s post at his Grain of Salt blog:

“…ultimately, I want every bit of every (AttentionTrust member) page I view to be 100% relevant to me. In my perfect world, this relevancy would come in the form of ad-free content. But I’m not so foolish as to think that my inattention to (in the form of not clicking on) the ads you display will cause them to magically disappear. So if you insist on cluttering up the content that I came for with things that I did not, at least take the time to analyze my existing attention data and make use of it.“

(emphasis added)