How Will We Be Paid For Our Attention?

Mobile devices (Blackberry, OQO and iPhone, iPod Touch) and laptops everywhere. Apple TV and home media servers, WiFi Hot Spots, home WiFi, mobile satellite radio and satellite radio at home. Satellite radio and GPS in our cars or on your hip. Even a Blackberry with GPS, music and video capability. I'm trying to figure out where exactly the iPod Touch fits in with the whole thing, but it's there and I have one. Although my 30Gb third gen iPod is now the family music library.

This is the attention economy. These devices are just indicators of how fragmented media has become. And how fragmented it will continue to be. Add in well over 7,000 Web 2.0 applications and counting, DVR's and changes in television viewing habits and that most connected people have at least 2 email accounts. It's a mess.

Seems few corporations can get the eyeballs of the masses, and if you can, you've really got a money maker and a mass market.

Given that demands ever growing on our time, it really shows that our attention may really be becoming more of a currency than cash. Marketers still look too much to obtain the "mass market", but that doesn't work anymore. The Attention Economy means going to segmented markets. Marketing in those channels that reach your segment brings greater economic success I think. I'm wondering how our "attention" as a resource, with more and more content and channels, will become more of a "value item" to marketers in the future.

How will companies pay me for my time resource, to get my attention? How will that turn business models on their head?