I recently spoke with Keri Roberts, the host of the Voice Summit’s podcast, Inside Voice, about the burgeoning, “Aural Attention Economy.” I first began writing about this new facet of the, “Attention Economy,” back in February when I wrote a two-part piece for Voicebot titled, “The Cambrian Explosion of Audio Content.” Since that piece, it’s been a concept that I’ve frequently blogged and spoken about.
As I mention at the onset of our conversation, much of this concept goes back to a key point that Spotify CEO, Daniel Ek, mentioned in a blog post shortly after Spotify acquired Anchor and Gimlet Media:
“To really understand, take the current value of the video industry. Consumers spend roughly the same amount of time on video as they do on audio. Video is about a trillion dollar market. And the music and radio industry is worth around a hundred billion dollars. I always come back to the same question: Are our eyes really worth 10 times more than our ears?”
With the advent of the iPhone and mass proliferation of smartphones, our attention has been increasingly monetized in one way or another through the apps on our phones (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, etc.). As Daniel Ek alludes to, much of that monetization has come via our eyes, whereas audio represents a large and rather untapped market versus visual-based media.
This conversation was a great opportunity to really walk through each aspect of how the, “Aural Attention Economy” is forming. We touch on new hardware that’s making consumption much more friction-less (smart speakers and hearables), the booming podcast market and how it might evolve to make audio-content more search-friendly, and how voice assistants will play a key role with accessing and controlling the audio internet and all the content housed within.
-Thanks for Reading-
Dave
