Right, but what if that attention becomes less valuable as time goes on? We're already at the point where many people don't even see ads on sites like Facebook

Right, but what if that attention becomes less valuable as time goes on? We're already at the point where many people don't even see ads on sites like Facebook. The ads are just background noise. In five to ten years, the kids born in the mid-90s who have never known life without the internet will start entering the workforce in large numbers. What happens if they're so desensitized to online advertising that they don't even notice it, for the most part? Will companies that derive most of their revenue from easy-to-ignore advertising find that they've hit a wall in terms of being able to derive revenue from the 'attention' of a large number of people?