The Empirical Economics of Online Attention | Hacker News Reader

The Empirical Economics of Online Attention

papers.ssrn.com

77 pointsDowwie23 comments

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."

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."

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.

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

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

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.

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

It depends on the job. Someone working security at a parking lot vs someone busing tables, or working as a barista.

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.

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.

My hypothesis would be something resembling a Poisson distribution. Most low pay, non-office jobs have little to no opportunity for social media, middle income office workers have lots of opportunity, and as you go up the pay/responsibility scale in office settings you see less and less social media use.

The study only measured home use.

I also think the correlations categorized by type of contents are way more interesting than the TlDr.

The study measured primary home device use based on click-stream data from comscore. This requires interpretation with the following considerations:

- The dataset they used is from a commercial entity with its own vested interests

- Secondary home device and non-home device use is not included; An increase in substitutes to the primary home-device should lead to lower primary home-device use

- Only click-stream data that can be gathered by comscore can be included

- Sampling bias of comscore (paper does not describe correction for this)

The higher the income, the higher the impact of non-primary devices is (simply, because with higher income you have more secondary devices)

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

tldr;

Online attention varies by household income.

That's great. How does it vary?

RTFP

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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