Attention Millionaires

I think anyone alive today would agree that attention is an insanely valuable resource. There are a finite number of hours in a day, and how all 8.1 billion human beings spend that time makes the world what it is, from consumer spending to politics.

In business, we see this idea packaged as the “attention economy,” where the core objective of so many companies is to capture a consistent chunk of our time. Everything from Spotify to Netflix to Fortnite to Paris Fashion Week to PornHub to the Olympics are all ultimately playing the same game, and it’s a cross-domain war for who can collect, monetize, and harvest the most human attention.

In financial markets, there are similar dynamics at play where flows of value are driven as much by memes and stories as “fundamental” metrics. Think about the COVID-era run on GameStop shares, or Tesla as a meme stock being worth more than the next 7 largest car companies combined, or the 2021 crypto bubble with all its dog coins, and so on.

Attention makes the world go around.

Now, this has always been the case to some extent, especially at the individual level. People who can command attention have always had disproportionate influence on the periods they lived in, including everyone from Cleopatra to Martin Luther blah blah, BUT there is something supercharged about the post-2010s social media era where all of us are a few clicks away from billions of people.

This is probably most intuitive at the celebrity level where, say, Mr. Beast as a YouTube creator or AOC as a congresswoman have insane reach compared to legacy actors and politicians.

What is more interesting to me than the elite part of this conversation though is how the same shifts in technology that have empowered celebrities with such huge reach have also created the conditions for an attention “middle class” to emerge i.e. people who can command some amount of attention within a niche but aren’t A-list celebrities.

I’ve started to think of these folks as attention millionaires.

An attention millionaire is someone who can command 1 million or more minutes of human attention over the course of a calendar year. This is the equivalent of 16,667 hours or 695 days’ worth of attention that someone has to capture every year to be part of the club, whether that’s through publishing a newsletter, dropping short-form video content, tweeting, or whatever else. Stay with me.

First, why a million minutes? I don’t know I made it up lol, but it is a helpful concept because it gives us a way to classify a different sort of person between the average consumer that doomscrolls brainrot content for hours and the Kardashian-level super moguls of the world that dictate the direction of culture. In a way, what I’m talking about is like a “micro influencer” in scale, but that term isn’t quite specific enough.

Second, why does this group of people matter? In short, they matter because with that amount of reach a creator (of any kind) has hit enough critical mass to have an impact, both on the world and in their own lives. With a million minutes under your control, you have enough attention to get jobs, start businesses, help friends raise money for charity, contribute to zeitgeisty conversations, make supplemental income on referral fees for different products, etc.

Over time, I think people in this category will collectively have more influence on the world than celebrities do in the same way that economies are more driven by middle class income earners than high net worth folks.

Think about it. Who has more direct and tangible impact on your real life:

Gordon Ramsey? Or the dude that writes a laugh-out-loud food blog where you get your local restaurant recommendations from? Diane von Furstenberg? Or your friend’s cousin that runs a fashion TikTok and is an early adopter of every trend that matters? Warren Buffet? Or the high time frame speculator you follow on X (with notifications on) because he makes good calls about markets that you align with?

It’s not even a contest in my mind, the niche people win every time because they have a stickier connection to us and our daily lives and a stronger claim on our attention. And as society continues to orient itself more intensely around attention as the core primitive in business, politics, and culture the attention millionaire class is only going to grow in power and relevance.

To me, they’re the real main characters of the internet era.