
The Empirical Economics of Online Attention - Dowwie
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2807046
======
dahart
This is central to the paper, but it helps to get a sense of the actual
numbers:

"...those with incomes greater than $100,000 spend 835 minutes of time online
per week while those with incomes less than $15,000 spend 979 minutes of time
online. A similar monotonicity appears in 2013."

------
jgowans
Anyone know if this study accounts for the shift from web to native apps?

"...in 2008, Chat is by far the largest category, attracting over 25% of
households’ attention; however, this category saw a dramatic shift by 2013,
dropping to less than 2% in 2013."

~~~
dingfeng_quek
It does not. Dataset is from comscore, see the comscore website, and comscore
is unable to track the click-stream of native apps. If it did, that would
raise many security issues.

~~~
majormajor
Looks like they have mobile SDKs that interested developers could hook into,
presumably they would also track aggregated numbers from that:
[http://www.comscore.com/applicationsdk](http://www.comscore.com/applicationsdk)

Probably only happens for apps with events that require third party
verification, though.

------
overcast
tldr;

The higher the income, the less time spent online. More income generally means
less free time, less time at work to screw around, and vice versa.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Have you never worked a menial job? If anything there's a direct correlation
between pay and opportunities to spend time on social media.

~~~
pc86
The data is in direct opposition to your assumption. Individuals with incomes
below $15,000 spend more time online than those with incomes above $100,000.

~~~
delazeur
The study only measured home use. We can't use it to draw conclusions about
how people in different income brackets use their time at work.

------
threepipeproblm
Patterns of attention distribution across sites are -- contrary to existing
theory -- stable across certain variables.

------
perseusprime11
tldr;

Online attention varies by household income.

~~~
guntars
That's great. How does it vary?

~~~
greesil
RTFP

~~~
AnimalMuppet
A TLDR maybe should tell you that. Otherwise, it becomes a TSDSA (Too Short,
Didn't Say Anything).

------
dahart
I haven't finished reading the paper, but the use of the word 'inferior' early
on caught my eye & tickled my spidey sense.

"The monotonic negative relationship between income and total time suggests
online attention is an inferior good."

To my eyes, this seems to be drawing a causal conclusion, and implying a
negative judgement. I might be mis-interpreting use of the word 'inferior'
here, but later in the paper, references to inferior seem less sensational to
me.

"we also observe “attention inferiority,” decline in the amount of online
attention with higher income."

"We find further evidence for persistent attention inferiority, namely, that
higher income households spend less total time online per week."

Those seem to say inferior == less, whereas the first one seems to suggest
that the Internet is less valuable to higher income people. Am I off base?

"We are limited in our ability to draw conclusions about the total time spent
online by a household across all devices, and we possess no information about
which household member spent time on the PC in multi-dweller households."

So, they make a lot of noise about higher incomes spending less time online,
and yet one possible explanation is that higher income families have more
devices and spend time online simultaneously, whereas lower income families
have to serialize their use.

~~~
kvb
It's a term of art. From Wikipedia[1]: "In economics, an inferior good is a
good that decreases in demand when consumer income rises (or rises in demand
when consumer income decreases), unlike normal goods, for which the opposite
is observed."

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferior_good](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferior_good)

~~~
dahart
Okay, yes, I misinterpreted. Thanks!

I'm still curious whether a decrease in demand has been demonstrated without
tracking who in the household is online.

"A possible concern about our finding of persistent attention distribution is
that the measures of online attention allocation may be strongly driven by a
household’s total time online on the home device."

The very concept of a single home device feels like an assumption. In my
household, the kids each have their own device. We tend to all go online on
separate devices at the same time, and then to all be offline when we're
spending time together.

~~~
dingfeng_quek
According to the paper, there's a decrease in demand by the primary home
device for activities trackable by comscore. This is the data used (not
technically an assmption). I do not see the paper claiming more than this.

The conclusions do not apply to aggregate demand from all device types. Only
certain types of activities are tracked.

My personal opinion is that the inferiority of online time is due to the
increase in use of and substitution to additional devices and apps that were
not tracked in the dataset - and a higher income better affords such
alternative devices, apps, and their data plans.

~~~
dahart
Yes, exactly - I agree with your opinion and was suspecting the same, that
substituting additional devices may explain the results.

But if untracked devices are responsible, or simultaneous online usage by
multiple household members is responsible, then doesn't that mean it's
possible that online time is not an inferior good? Couldn't it even be
opposite of that, that higher income households are actually online more than
lower income, because they have more devices, and don't use the primary home
device? It seems likely to me that the idea of a primary home device applies
more to, and affects more people in lower income households.

