Platforms extract rents by controlling user attention through algorithms, distorting organic results to favour paid placements — thereby transferring value away from users and suppliers toward the platform and its advertisers.
Arrive with a scarce, non-renewable attention budget the platform harvests on behalf of advertisers.
Acts as auctioneer — allocating screen real estate to the highest adjusted bid while tuning relevance signals to maximise ad revenue.
Submit real-time bids for attention slots. Higher bids secure premium positions regardless of product relevance or quality.
Organic results are pushed below the fold. 35% of clicks on a typical SERP go to unpaid listings — the rest captured by paid slots above.
Representative figures. Actual share varies by query intent and industry vertical.
Platform ad revenue per 1,000 users (amber) vs the estimated fair-market rate if users were compensated for the attention they provide (green). The gap represents value transferred to the platform.
Kiwi News is a permissionless link aggregator with no ads, no opaque ranking, and no algorithmic distortion. Stories are submitted and upvoted by EIP-712 signed messages from verified Kiwi Pass holders — organic quality is the only signal.
— attention-marketplace · 5 sections —