The Attention Economy and Brands · Part Four
The press offers a tempting precedent for today’s attention competition. Publishers fought for readers, sensational presentation helped sell copies, and credibility offered another way to compete. It is easy to turn that into a reassuring story: eventually people tire of exaggeration, and trust wins.
I no longer think the last step follows automatically. The history is useful because it raises questions about incentives and institutions. It does not supply a timetable for social media to become more reliable.
1. A comparable pressure, not an identical system
The American penny press emerged in the 1830s. The New York Sun, launched in 1833, became a successful low-price daily, combining mass circulation, advertising and street distribution. Its sensational stories were part of its appeal.
That development should be distinguished from the late-nineteenth-century competition associated with yellow journalism, including Pulitzer’s World and Hearst’s Journal. They belong to a longer history of making attention commercially valuable, not one event at the end of the century.
The comparison with a feed is useful at a particular level: an item has to be selected from alternatives, and presentation can influence that selection. But newspaper sales and advertising were connected revenue streams. They should not be reduced to a single payment for every moment of exposure.
Nor does cheaper production mean cheaper attention. If more material competes for a limited audience, effective attention may become harder to obtain. Production cost, distribution cost and the value of a reader’s attention are separate questions.
2. Credibility needs conditions under which it can pay
Historical accounts of yellow journalism describe several pressures on sensational reporting: criticism of fabrication, commercial opportunities for credible journalism, legal constraints and the development of professional standards. Ochs’s New York Times is one example discussed in that history.
These developments suggest that credibility can become a competitive advantage. They do not establish that ethics contributed nothing, or that commercial incentives alone produced the change. Professional commitments, public criticism, law and business models can reinforce one another.
For credibility to reward its producer, more is needed than its scarcity. An audience must recognise the difference, care about it enough to change behaviour, and support a business model through which the producer receives value. A trusted publication can serve a valuable audience without replacing every sensational competitor.
That is the question I would carry forward: under what conditions does reliable work become both useful to the audience and sustainable for the organisation producing it?
3. Fatigue is not the same as demand for accuracy
The strongest limit to the analogy is user motivation. Someone using a feed to relax may respond to fatigue by finding different entertainment. That is not necessarily a move towards verification or factual depth.
Pew’s 2024 survey of adult TikTok users in the United States illustrates why the distinction matters: entertainment was a widely reported reason for using the platform, while getting news was much less often a major reason. The finding is specific to that population and platform, but it cautions against treating all feed use as information-seeking.
The same person can also switch purposes. Casual browsing and checking a claim before buying something can happen on the same app. Credible information may matter greatly at the decision point while occupying only a small share of daily screen time.
The Reuters Institute’s 2025 report offers a compatible observation: trusted news brands remain important destinations when people want to check information, even as social and video consumption grows. A source can retain that function without becoming the centre of everyone’s media routine.
So I would not infer a broad return to credibility from complaints about clickbait. Those complaints show dissatisfaction. They do not, by themselves, show where attention goes next.
Figure 1. Conditions under which credibility may create a competitive advantage. Fatigue with sensational content does not guarantee a shift towards verification.
4. Standards exist; their effectiveness is the question
It would also be wrong to say that digital advertising has no shared standards. The ICC Advertising and Marketing Communications Code provides an established framework, including for digital marketing and social media.
The useful questions concern adoption, enforcement and incentives: who follows a standard, how violations are handled and whether compliance fits the pressures of daily production. Writing a rule and making it effective are different achievements.
Platforms also have governance arrangements; they are not simply algorithms without people. The relevant comparison concerns how responsibility is distributed between publishers, platforms, advertisers and creators, and how far their commercial interests support the standards they state.
The historical comparison points to incentives, standards, and enforcement as questions to examine in today’s platforms.
5. What this means for a brand
For a brand, credibility is worth treating as something built through recognisable behaviour: claims that can be substantiated, promises that match the experience and a response when something goes wrong. Consistency can support that credibility, but consistent repetition of a weak claim is not enough.
There is no fixed schedule on which it pays back. Credibility may help a purchase now, support a relationship later or reduce uncertainty when a problem arises. It is not only a defensive benefit, and it does not guarantee lower acquisition costs every year.
Direct audience relationships can provide another useful route. An owned channel, membership or recurring publication can give people a reason to return without a fresh recommendation. But return visits do not measure trust by themselves, and paid content may be selling entertainment, access or convenience rather than accuracy.
The implication is conditional rather than comforting. Credibility can create value where the audience needs it, can recognise it and has a reason to act on it. Attention-heavy entertainment can remain commercially successful at the same time.
That makes the history worth reading. It helps identify conditions we can examine and influence, without promising that fatigue will bring the whole market back to reliable information.
Fourth in a series on the attention economy and brands. The final piece asks how brand teams can combine important creative work with the management of everyday communication.
Sources
JSTOR Daily, “To Fix Fake News, Look To Yellow Journalism”. A historical overview, used here as a comparison rather than proof of a single causal explanation.
Pew Research Center, “How TikTok users view, experience the platform”, 2024.
Reuters Institute, Digital News Report 2025: overview and key findings.
