Rivals for Attention

There’s an old saying that nothing’s certain but death and taxes. I want to add something else to the list. There are only 168 hours in a week. Everything you do from sleeping to working to watching television to eating and romance you need to do in those 168 hours. That’s one tough constraint.

Now you might ask, what does this have to do with the purported subject of this column—the antitrust economics of multi-sided platforms? Plenty it turns out, as I explain in my recent paper on attention rivals.

There are many multi-sided platforms that are in the business of trying to get a piece of your 168-a-week time allotment hours. Most of them turn around and sell access to the time you are spending on their platform to various businesses that would like to reach you—like advertisers, merchants that want to sell to you directly, and companies that want you to use their applications.

Most of the online platforms are attention rivals and those are the businesses I focus on in the paper and in this column.

Facebook has secured a big chunk of people’s time. And they make money from that attention by selling space to advertisers on Facebook pages. Those advertisers hope that you’ll give them a piece of the attention you are giving to Facebook. Amazon on the other hand gets a lot of people to go to its pages to read reviews, browse merchandise, and then buy products. They share that attention with merchants who sell through Amazon. Google dra