The internet became a terrible place. It seems that today we need to give our data, content and attention to others in order to receive a virtual form of social affirmation. This is my answer to that.

Attention as a currency

I don’t like this. I have trouble managing my attention and I noticed I started to develop several nervous habits. I am a child of the internet, a true early adopter. Hence I used to be an avid user of any services that had gained traction. It was interesting to see platforms rise to the liking of the crowds, but also to see them disappear again to be forgotten. The end result seems to be a war of titans, with monopolies fighting for our attention and content. Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google {Home|Photos|Mail|Drive|etc}. The patterns and habits we develop in using these services and apps are new. When we pat each other on the back and talk about rising engagement numbers or stickiness, what does that mean to the person that has been using your app? Did we solve a problem? Maybe. Did we improve that person’s quality of life? Probably not. Not really, at least. But to keep these services running we need to monetize them, make money off the attention that we’ve generated.

Since a couple of months we’ve been anxious, excited and proud. A new human was about to be born, but most importantly; it would be our human. We quickly learned that the old-school Dutch name “Teun” is a little complicated to pronounce for non-Dutch speakers. Luckily we could do something about that. Borrowing some code I’ve previously wrote on Music Hack Day projects, we’ve whipped up this little landing page to help people to learn how to pronounce his name. Of course we’ve registered his name as a domain. So, a little landing page, a little domain, here’s to you little man: https://www.teunvanderven.com.

My early learnings as an online media consultant still seem valid. As the current market is changing at a maddening pace I thought it relevant to write a retrospect. In 2007 I had my first job at a publisher, Techmedia. It was a small company (±6 people) and we worked with a network of freelancers to publish a young brand called Bright. We worked on a magazine, weblog, video podcast and even a TV show. I was really excited about the market we were in, traditional publishers were just starting to understand what was coming and we had the opportunity to alternate between these two worlds: online and traditional media. We were creating branded entertainment, sponsored stories and set up barters with similar outlets in the market. After working there for a while I needed to expand my views and quit my job but started freelancing for several other publishers. It was at the end of 2007, in an attempt to structure my learnings that I wrote this manifest. Besides some proof reading by friends I never published this, until I found it again in my notes.