The UN report on the attention economy actually said: By the 2000s, so much information was being generated worldwide that only a small fraction (0.5% in 2015)

The UN report on the attention economy actually said: By the 2000s, so much information was being generated worldwide that only a small fraction (0.5% in 2015) of the digital data generated was being analyzed at all. https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/attention_economy_feb.pdf https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/attention_economy_... Where "analyzed" probably means something other than "got any views". In any case, the claim is unsourced, so I wouldn't put much stock in it. The way I see it, people's ability to give attention is limited, but the ability to do something worth paying attention to is even scarcer, so even the most trivial feat (like writing a comment on HN) is likely to garner at least a few views. Becoming famous is much harder than getting any views at all, because now you need to do something so attention-grabbing that some of your few initial viewers will tell others about it and your audience size snowballs from there.