Social network stories: the “Attention Heist”
A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to a conversational podcast on which the host talks with an artist about her creation workflow. She said she can craft during hours an Instagram story that will only stay online for 24h. This made me realize the big corporates had probably broken the online attention game with the “stories” feature…
First they only wanted our money
Basically a B2C relationship is based on money. So initially the corporate sells a service or a product in exchange of the customer’s money. But Internet changed it all when it started to be mainly free (with the exception of the providers fees).
So to get a place on Internet, corporates need to provide free things : app, services, abstracts, … And to get some faster return on investment, the business model based on ads took over the place. Do you remember those early 2000’s web popups and ugly website banners? Thankfully the adblokers were soon invented and brought us some peace.
Then they wanted our data
Then 2 things changed the game: smarter advertisment and social network. First to be accepted the ad needed to be either discreet (but they might miss the point of advertising) or be more focused on what the user may want. That is why on Internet everybody craves for our data: Facebook, Google, the cookies… (With GDPR some website cookie management panels are a joke from a little banner to accept them to a huge popup with loads of switches to deactivate.)
But such amounts of data are they really interesting? I’m not an expert so I wonder if they are really easy to manage? Aren’t they some kind of never ending flow to compute?
Besides I still don’t get advertisment about interesting products. Do you ?
Now they need our attention
In the Semrush Top 100 most visited websites, you have Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram amongst the first 11th most visited websites.
Years ago, SnapChat invented the “Stories”: short video clips that only stay 24h and then disappear for ever. It was very coherent with their initial value to give a way to send messages that will never back fire at you because they are erase from Internet as soon as they are read. Ok, you had countless way to save them but it’s not the point here. So their “Stories” were just another way to turn SnapChat into a real social network and not only a simple messaging app!
So what initialy was an interesting messaging feature turned out to be an amazing social network “two ways” attention trap! We all know the story (sorry for this bad joke): the feature was soon copied by Instagram and then by any other plateforms: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Linked In, …
Let’s get back to the podcast where the Intagram girl tells she can spend more than 2 hours editing a one minute long story. So she spends 8,3% of her day (or 12,5% of the time she is awake) to work on a one minute long video to entertain her instagram community, that will only stay online for 24h before vanish! She explained this commitment by her passion for her community and because she loves publishing quality content (Notice that she did say content, not art, not clip, not even video but content! Well that’s another debate). She has a big community of around 400k followers. It took her years to build it, so it has a great value for her and for the brands whom hire her.
This feature is not only a trap for the followers, who have to come back everyday on the social network to get their influencer’s last news. But it’s also a trap for the influencers who have to keep on providing their community with constant new quality content. So the bigger the community gets, the more they have to work to keep it growing! They could develop communities on another platform not to be totally bond to the first one, but they have no time left to dedicate to another social network because we all have only 24h hours a day.
The biased Mexican Standoff of attention
So this makes some kind of Mexican Standoff between the plaform, the influencer and the community. But it’s biased because the platform has it both ways.
I don’t know if this was the initial motivation behind this “stories” feature but it’s a very clever outcome! The problem with money and data on this market is that the cake is virtually infinite. So the amount of efforts to get it all is also infinite. But on the other hand, the attention cake is limited because our time is limited. A day is 24 hours and then it repeats. I feel like once you acquired most of the cake, it is tremendously more difficult for the competitors to get it back. Just like a castle on the top of the hill. Once you have reached the top of the hill, you build your castle to strengthen your position. It will be almost mission impossible for your competitors to move you out and you will see them coming.
Today Facebook with Instagram might have won it all even if TikTok seems to be dangerous. That is why Facebook strategically moves its assets: merging WhatsApp data to Facebook, implementing ClubHouse features to kill it before it is even born (and all the other social network do so), …
Conclusion
Do we want our attention to be vampirized, overwhelmed by few major corporations? Yes we have been aware of this issue for a decade now. We know social networks make us see, chat, exchange with people with the same point of view than us to keep us on their plateforms. But to me our attention is even more helpless, defenseless than our opinion because it is a passive state. Opinion is forged, we want to share it so this will induce action. But attention is a default state, when we do nothing else than passively listening or, worse, just hearing!
Let’s take back our precious attention and conscientiously choose who or what we are giving it to.
Thank you for your attention.
