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Media and Marketing After the Attention Economy Robert Hunt View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Concordia University Research Repository The Heart’s Content: Media and Marketing after the Attention Economy Robert Hunt A Thesis in The Department of Communication Studies Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (Media Studies) at Concordia University Montreal, Quebec, Canada March 2018 © Robert Hunt, 2018 CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY School of Graduate Studies This is to certify that the thesis prepared By: Robert Hunt Entitled: The Heart’s Content: Media and Marketing after the Attention Economy and submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Media Studies) complies with the regulations of the University and meets the accepted standards with respect to originality and quality. Signed by the final Examining Committee: Dr. Peter C. van Wyck Chair Dr. Charles R. Acland Examiner Dr. Stefanie Duguay Examiner Dr. Fenwick McKelvey Supervisor Approved by: Chair of Department or Graduate Program Director or Dean of Faculty Date: March 28, 2018 Abstract The Heart’s Content: Media and Marketing after the Attention Economy Robert Hunt Capturing user attention and selling it to advertisers has long served as the basic economic model for online media. In this thesis, I investigate these companies’ growing desire to go deeper—to plumb their users’ hearts and minds, to transform their emotions into quantifiable data, and to sell those feelings to marketers. To shed light on the recent history of this trend, I take up the website Upworthy as a key case study in online publishers’ efforts to negotiate an attention economy in flux. By analyzing the evolving methods Upworthy used to capture, measure, and sell reader attention to clients, I trace their audience engagement and revenue generation strategies along a trajectory from attention to emotion to empathy. As the attention economy becomes more complex, the perceived need to monitor and measure the psychological, emotional, and affective dimensions of user engagement grows. Biometric emotion-detection technology provides a means to examine the ramifications of these proliferating forms of psychological surveillance and datafication, including their potential to reinforce hegemonic emotional norms. Finally, with the possibility of what I call the “empathy economy” on the horizon, I consider empathy’s political implications, the intimate data and sensitive technology that such an economy would require, and the forms of emotional commodification, standardization, and optimization it could engender. iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my examining committee for a wonderful finish to a long and challenging project. My gratitude goes to Charles R. Acland and Stefanie Duguay for their thoughtful and illuminating questions and comments and to Peter C. van Wyck for once again mediating a group of intimidatingly smart people with kindness and generosity. Thanks also to Bill Buxton, Mia Consalvo, Sandra Gabriele, and Matt Soar. I am deeply grateful to my thesis supervisor, Fenwick McKelvey, for providing invaluable feedback and guidance, much-appreciated encouragement, a constant stream of ideas and articles, meaningful work, podcast recommendations I might now finally get around to, and good humor—all of which made this thesis stronger and the writing of it easier. I feel very lucky to have spent the past three years among an exceptional group of colleagues and friends. Special thanks go to Elise Cotter, Danica Evering, Helena Krobath, Aimee Louw, Simone Lucas, and Catherine van Reenen for “work” sessions, complaint airing, advice, pep talks, and much-needed lolz. Many thanks to my family for their enthusiasm and willingness to listen to me pontificate: Jayne and Peter, Simon and Sara, Kathy and John, Sujata and Heimito, and Ira and Indrajit. Thanks also to Sadie and Jack for making the future feel less scary and a lot more adorable. Finally, in too many ways both literal and figurative to enumerate here, this project could not have happened without the amazing and unwavering support and encouragement of my partner, Surabhi Ghosh—thank you so much, and I’m sorry I ruined the internet. iv Table of Contents Figures ...................................................................................................................................... vi Chapter 1 / Introduction ........................................................................................................... 1 Attention ................................................................................................................................. 3 Emotion .................................................................................................................................. 7 Data ...................................................................................................................................... 10 Thesis Overview ................................................................................................................... 12 Chapter 2 / Upworthy: From Attention to Empathy ............................................................. 15 Starting Up Upworthy ........................................................................................................... 16 Capturing Attention: Editorial Strategies ............................................................................... 18 Measuring Attention: Data and Analytics .............................................................................. 25 Selling Attention: Business Models ....................................................................................... 33 Governing Attention: Platforms ............................................................................................ 39 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 44 Chapter 3 / Emotion Detection: The Attention Economy Gets Intimate .............................. 47 Detecting Emotion ................................................................................................................ 48 Observing Unobservables...................................................................................................... 49 Sensitive Machines ............................................................................................................... 52 Emotional Data ..................................................................................................................... 58 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 64 Chapter 4 / The Empathy Economy ....................................................................................... 67 Marketing Empathy............................................................................................................... 68 Caching Feelings................................................................................................................... 69 Empathetic Media ................................................................................................................. 73 The Trouble with Empathy .................................................................................................... 76 Feeling Spent ........................................................................................................................ 79 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 81 v Figures Fig. 1: An example of A/B testing headlines ............................................................................. 19 Fig. 2: Pageviews versus attention minutes for three Upworthy stories ...................................... 28 Fig. 3: Various emotions plotted by valence and arousal ........................................................... 31 Fig. 4: Sean Wojcik’s slide detailing the empathy impact study ................................................ 33 Fig. 5: A promotional content disclosure from an Upworthy article. .......................................... 35 Fig. 6: Branded content versus non-branded .............................................................................. 37 Fig. 7: Promotional material from Affectiva highlighting the Affdex Score ............................... 70 vi Chapter 1 / Introduction To say that Facebook had a rough time in 2017 would be an understatement. The months following Donald Trump’s election in the US were marked by continual revelations about Facebook’s vulnerability to fraud, exploitation, and manipulation by malicious actors, be they entrepreneurial Macedonian teenagers or Kremlin-funded professional trolls.1 The accretion of these stories made the social media platform and its CEO, cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, the target of an array of damning charges, including the suddenly not absurd possibility that the ease of gaming the company’s advertising-and-engagement-dependent revenue model was contributing to the destruction of democracy.2 Some of Facebook’s peers in Silicon Valley—especially Twitter and Google—faced similar denunciations, but Zuckerberg’s willingness to publicly agonize over the direction his company and its massive user base is headed appears to be unique (as does the propensity for former employees and associates to just as publicly condemn the company).3 And so,
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