The Attention Landscape · established evidence
The Forgotten Founders of the Attention Economy: Goldhaber and Franck, 1997 and 1998
The phrase "attention economy" is usually credited to a 2001 business book, but the idea was named for the network age four years earlier, and independently a year after that on the other side of the Atlantic. In 1997 the American physicist Michael Goldhaber argued in the journal First Monday that the internet runs on attention, not information, as its native scarce resource. In 1998 the German architecture professor Georg Franck published a book making the parallel claim that attention behaves as a currency in its own right. Neither knew he was describing the machinery of Google, social media, or the smartphone, because none of them existed yet. Recovering these two founders matters, because when the same idea is derived twice, from physics and from architecture, arriving at the same conclusion, it is a good sign the idea is structural rather than a passing marketing fashion.
Two thinkers, one idea, reached from opposite ends
History tends to award the attention economy to whoever put the phrase on a bestseller cover. That credit usually goes to Thomas Davenport and John Beck, whose 2001 book carried the term into mainstream management thinking. But the concept was already fully formed, and named, before either of them wrote. Two people had arrived there first, working in different countries, in different languages, from disciplines that rarely speak to each other.
The first was Michael Goldhaber, an American physicist who had turned to writing about technology and society. The second was Georg Franck, a German scholar trained in economics who taught architecture and urban design. One came to attention through the physics of a networked information glut; the other through the economics of prestige and public visibility. That two such different routes converge on one conclusion is the reason this piece treats them as founders rather than footnotes.
The idea had a founding theorem before it had a name
Neither man invented the underlying insight from nothing. Both were building on a single, precise observation made decades earlier by the economist and Nobel laureate Herbert Simon. Writing in 1971 for an audience of organizational designers worried about early computerization, Simon stated the mechanism plainly: "What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
That sentence is the founding theorem of attention economics. It says that as information becomes abundant, the binding constraint shifts to the finite thing that information consumes, which is human attention. Simon wrote it five years before the personal computer reached the public and a quarter century before the web. What Goldhaber and Franck did was take that theorem out of the organizational-design context Simon wrote it for and build a full economic account of the networked world on top of it.
Goldhaber, 1997: attention is the natural economy of the net
Michael Goldhaber presented "The Attention Economy: The Natural Economy of the Net" at a Harvard Kennedy School conference on the economics of digital information in January 1997, and published it in the online journal First Monday later that year. His argument was direct. As more of life moved online, information itself would become effectively unlimited and therefore close to worthless as a scarce good. What would stay scarce, and therefore become the real currency, was attention: the finite human capacity to notice and engage.
The physicist in Goldhaber pushed the claim further than a marketer would have dared. He treated attention not as one metric among many but as the organizing economic logic of the entire network, a resource with its own flows, its own inequalities, and its own accumulation dynamics. The striking thing, read from today, is the timing. In January 1997 Google did not yet exist, the word "blog" had not been coined, and social media was years away. Goldhaber was describing the economic engine of platforms that had not been built.
Franck, 1998: attention as a currency and "mental capitalism"
A year later, and apparently along an independent path, the German scholar Georg Franck published Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit, which translates as "The Economy of Attention." Franck had been circling the idea for most of a decade, in essays for the journal Merkur in 1989 and 1993, before setting it out at book length in 1998. His framing was that attention functions as a second currency, running parallel to money and increasingly competing with it, with its own logic of earning, spending, and accumulation. He gave that logic a memorable name: "mental capitalism."
Where Goldhaber came at attention from the physics of information abundance, Franck came at it from the economics of prestige, reputation, and public standing. A person who is widely attended to, he argued, holds a form of income that behaves like wealth. Like Goldhaber, he built explicitly on Simon's scarcity point, but he extended it into a theory of social and cultural value rather than of network traffic. The convergence is the point: two independent derivations, from different disciplines and different languages, reaching the same structural conclusion within a year of each other.
A note on sourcing
Franck's book is a German-language primary source. For this article it has been verified through German-language reference material and trade coverage rather than read in the original, so the specific characterizations of his argument are reported here as secondary-sourced. The existence, date, publisher, and central thesis of the 1998 book are well documented; fine points of interpretation should be checked against the original text or a published English translation before being quoted directly.
Why 1997 and 1998 are the remarkable dates
It is easy to read early attention-economy writing as if its authors were describing the world we already live in. They were not. The way to appreciate Goldhaber and Franck is to hold the calendar firmly in view. When Goldhaber named the attention economy of the net, the defining machines of that economy had not arrived. Google was founded in 1998, the year Franck's book appeared. The first recognizably modern social networks were still years off. The smartphone that would make attention capture continuous and portable was roughly a decade away.
This is what separates a forecast that happened to be lucky from a genuine structural insight. Goldhaber and Franck did not observe attention platforms and then theorize them. They reasoned from a scarcity principle to the conclusion that whatever came next would be organized around attention, and then the platforms arrived and behaved as predicted. An idea that predicts the shape of technologies not yet built is a stronger idea than one assembled after the fact to explain them.
How the idea reached business: Davenport, Beck, and Wu
The phrase most people know entered management vocabulary in 2001, when Thomas Davenport and John Beck published The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business with Harvard Business School Press. Their contribution was translation rather than discovery. They took the concept out of net culture and academic theory and framed it as a management problem organizations must actually solve, on both sides at once: capturing the attention of customers and employees, while rationing the organization's own scarce attention. The book was widely recognized as one of the notable business titles of its year.
A decade and a half later the historian Tim Wu supplied the long backstory. His 2016 book The Attention Merchants traced how advertising-funded media, from the nineteenth-century penny press through radio, television, and the internet, have repeatedly industrialized the capture and resale of human attention. Wu's pattern is useful precisely because it is a pattern: each new medium gets colonized by the business of harvesting attention. Placed next to Goldhaber and Franck, it turns their prediction into a documented historical regularity rather than a one-off guess.
What the founders got right, and what they could not have seen
Read carefully, the 1997 and 1998 arguments hold up well, but they were built for a world of human readers choosing among human-legible sources. Goldhaber and Franck modeled attention as a scarce human resource competed for by publishers and personalities. What they did not, and could not, anticipate was that software would eventually attend on a person's behalf. When an answer engine reads thousands of sources and returns a synthesized verdict, or when a shopping agent shortlists vendors for a buyer, a second layer of selection sits between the source and the human. That is genuinely new territory, and it should be labeled as an extension of the founders' idea rather than something they proved.
It is also worth resisting the temptation to over-claim priority. Simon stated the load-bearing theorem in 1971; Goldhaber and Franck named and elaborated the network-age economy in 1997 and 1998; Davenport and Beck operationalized it for managers in 2001; Wu documented the historical pattern in 2016. The intellectual credit is distributed across that chain. The value of recovering Goldhaber and Franck is not to crown a single inventor, but to show that the core claim was reached more than once, independently, before the technologies that made it obvious existed.
Why the pedigree matters for how you invest today
This is not merely an exercise in intellectual archaeology. If attention is a scarce, competed-for currency, as two independent thinkers concluded from first principles nearly thirty years ago, then a business decision follows directly. The surfaces where your buyers' attention actually concentrates are the assets worth winning, and standing on those surfaces is a resource-allocation problem rather than a marketing slogan.
That reframing is the whole reason a firm can talk about visibility as an investment rather than a vanity pursuit. When the underlying idea has been derived twice, by a physicist and an architect, and then confirmed by a historian tracing two centuries of media, you are not betting on a fad. You are acting on a structural feature of information-rich environments that Simon named in 1971 and that has held through every medium since. The practical question left over is the measurable one: on the surfaces your buyers now use, where does your attention actually stand.
The evidence
Key findings, with their sources
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Michael Goldhaber named the attention economy of the internet in 1997, arguing attention rather than information is the net's native scarce resource, the year before Google was founded.
established Michael H. Goldhaber, "The Attention Economy: The Natural Economy of the Net", First Monday, 2(4), 1997 (presented at a Harvard Kennedy School conference, January 1997).
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Georg Franck argued attention functions as a currency parallel to money, an idea he called "mental capitalism", building explicitly on Simon's 1971 scarcity point.
established Georg Franck, Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit: Ein Entwurf (Carl Hanser Verlag, 1998); preceded by essays in Merkur, 1989 and 1993. German-language primary source, corroborated via German-language reference and trade coverage.
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The founding theorem of attention economics: "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention", stated for organizational designers in 1971, five years before the personal computer reached the public.
established Herbert A. Simon, "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World", in M. Greenberger (ed.), Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest (Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), pp. 37-52.
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The phrase "attention economy" entered mainstream business thinking in 2001, framing attention as a management problem organizations must ration on both sides.
established Thomas H. Davenport & John C. Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business (Harvard Business School Press, 2001).
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Advertising-funded media have industrialized the capture and resale of human attention across every new medium from the penny press to the internet, a repeating historical pattern.
established Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016).
Calibration
What is proven, what is promising, what is unproven
| Evidence tier | Tactics | What the evidence says |
|---|---|---|
| established | Simon's 1971 scarcity theorem; Goldhaber's 1997 First Monday paper; the 1998 date, publisher, and central thesis of Franck's book; Davenport and Beck 2001; Wu 2016. | Primary and canonical texts, verified against multiple citations. |
| emerging | The extension of attention-as-currency to algorithmic and multi-agent selection, where software attends on a buyer's behalf. | A reasoned extension of the founders' idea, not something they demonstrated; labeled as synthesis. |
| contested | Assigning sole priority or a single "inventor" of the attention economy. | The credit is distributed across Simon, Goldhaber, Franck, Davenport and Beck, and Wu; any single-founder claim is an oversimplification. |
Reference
Glossary
- Attention economy
- The idea that in a world of abundant information, attention is the genuinely scarce resource, and therefore the real currency competed for by media, platforms, and businesses.
- Scarcity theorem
- Herbert Simon's 1971 observation that information consumes attention, so a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention that must be allocated efficiently.
- Mental capitalism
- Georg Franck's term for a system in which attention behaves as a second currency running parallel to money, with its own logic of earning and accumulation.
- First Monday
- A peer-reviewed online journal about the internet, where Michael Goldhaber published "The Attention Economy: The Natural Economy of the Net" in 1997.
Straight answers
Frequently asked questions
Who invented the term "attention economy"?
No single person owns it cleanly. Herbert Simon stated the underlying scarcity theorem in 1971. Michael Goldhaber named the attention economy of the internet in a 1997 First Monday paper, and Georg Franck made a parallel argument in his 1998 German-language book. Thomas Davenport and John Beck then carried the phrase into mainstream business thinking in 2001. The credit is distributed across that chain rather than belonging to one inventor.
Why are Goldhaber and Franck called "forgotten" founders?
Because the phrase most people know entered public vocabulary through the 2001 Davenport and Beck business book, the two thinkers who named and elaborated the idea years earlier are often skipped. Goldhaber wrote in 1997 and Franck in 1998, each from a different discipline and country, before the phrase became a bestseller term.
What is significant about the 1997 and 1998 dates?
They predate the technologies now most associated with attention capture. Google was founded in 1998, modern social media came later, and the smartphone was roughly a decade away. Goldhaber and Franck reasoned from a scarcity principle to the conclusion that the coming networked world would be organized around attention, and then the platforms arrived and behaved that way.
Does any of this old theory matter for a business today?
Yes, in a concrete way. If attention is a scarce, competed-for currency, as two independent thinkers concluded from first principles, then winning the surfaces where your buyers' attention concentrates is a rational allocation decision. The idea being derived more than once, independently, is a reason to treat surface visibility as a structural investment rather than a passing trend.
Is the claim that Goldhaber and Franck worked independently proven?
The public record shows two authors, in different countries and languages, publishing the same core idea within a year of each other, both building on Simon. Independent arrival is the most natural reading of that record. Franck's book is a German-language source verified here through secondary reference material, so the fine details of his argument are reported as secondary-sourced rather than read in the original.
Provenance
Sources
- Herbert A. Simon, "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World", in M. Greenberger (ed.), Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, Johns Hopkins Press, 1971, pp. 37-52 (established)
- Michael H. Goldhaber, "The Attention Economy: The Natural Economy of the Net", First Monday, 2(4), 1997 (established)firstmonday.org
- Georg Franck, Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit: Ein Entwurf, Carl Hanser Verlag, 1998; essays in Merkur, 1989 and 1993 (established; German-language primary, secondary-sourced here)
- Thomas H. Davenport & John C. Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business, Harvard Business School Press, 2001 (established)
- Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, Alfred A. Knopf, 2016 (established)
Every figure above is attributed to a real, dated source and tagged with its evidence tier. Where a claim could not be verified to a primary source, it is not stated as fact.