human attention has always been a commodity. Look at historical FM, AM, broadcast TV advertising. companies like nielsen made attempts to quantify and measure

human attention has always been a commodity. Look at historical FM, AM, broadcast TV advertising. companies like nielsen made attempts to quantify and measure actual viewership, hard to do in the 1-way-analog-broadcast era. Big difference now is that every social media thing has its own app that can specifically track ever click, every scroll, every like, viewing time per image and page, on an extremely granular basis. Look at why reddit is trying so hard to steer people into using their app rather than use it through a browser. ultimately the revenue stream for these app based social media things comes from the company selling advertising to you, of course. it's just much more targeted now than in the analog broadcast era.