The Internet, though, is a world of abundance, and there is a new power that matters: the ability to make sense of that abundance, to index it, to find needles in the proverbial haystack. And that power is held by Google. Thus, while the audiences advertisers crave are now hopelessly fractured amongst an effectively infinite number of publishers, t... See more

But an ad-driven marketplace adds a deeper layer, where the audience is actually on the supply side. Their attention is what demand-side nodes — i.e. advertisers and content producers — want.

Google and Facebook play the roles of central bankers for our attention economy. They represented a generation of “free-to-play” games that unlocked infinite consumer surplus and participation, and with increasing power as the brokers of the value exchange, they now require “paying to win”.