The attention economy

摘要

TWO ENTERTAINMENT TITANS dominated the charts for the last few months of 2016: the mighty Walt Disney and Ryan, a five-year-old boy. Disney's blockbuster films topped America's box office in nine of the last ten weeks of the year. Ryan's YouTube channel, featuring his parents' daily videos of him at his home in California, was the site's most watched in America for the last 20 weeks of the year. Most of his audience is made up of children in his own age group, gleefully looking at him unboxing and playing with toys, some of them from the Disney empire.