The economics of attention in a noisy world

Everyone is publishing. Almost no one is reading. We live in an era of infinite content and finite attention, and the math doesn't work in anyone's favor.

Understanding this imbalance is the first step to building something that cuts through.

The attention deficit

In 2010, the average person consumed about 34 gigabytes of information per day. By 2025, that number has more than doubled. We scroll through more content before breakfast than our grandparents consumed in a week.

But our brains haven't evolved to match. We still have the same cognitive bandwidth we had a century ago. The same working memory. The same attention span — which, contrary to popular belief, hasn't actually shortened. What's changed is the competition for it.

Why most content fails

The default strategy for dealing with the attention economy is volume. Publish more. Post more. Be everywhere, all the time. The logic is simple: if attention is scarce, you need to cast a wider net.

This is exactly wrong. Volume without quality is noise. And noise, by definition, is what people learn to ignore.

The content that fails isn't bad — it's forgettable. It's the blog post that says what ten other blog posts said. The newsletter that shares the same links everyone else shared. The take that's warm when it needs to be hot, safe when it needs to be surprising.

The economics of trust

Attention follows trust. People don't subscribe to newsletters because they have nothing to read — they subscribe because they trust that this particular writer will be worth their time. Every issue is a deposit into or withdrawal from that trust account.

The answer is consistency, specificity, and honesty. Show up regularly, so people know what to expect. Write about specific things, so people know what they're getting. Be honest about what you know and don't know, so people trust what you say.

Less but better

The most successful independent writers and creators have figured out something counterintuitive: you don't need a large audience. You need a loyal one. A thousand people who open every email are worth more than a hundred thousand who scroll past.

In a world where everyone is shouting, the most radical thing you can do is speak quietly — and mean every word.

"The goal isn't to be seen by everyone. It's to matter to someone."