The Attention Age is the era in which information became abundant and attention became the scarce resource — so businesses stopped competing to inform and started competing to be attended to.
Rich Schefren named and argued it in The Attention Age Doctrine (June 2007) and The Attention Age Doctrine, Volume Two (November 2007).
The definition
In Rich Schefren’s own words, from The Attention Age Doctrine, June 2007:
“With information no longer scarce, and an ever increasing number of new technologies being developed to continually interrupt us, and too many choices to consider with almost everything, the resource that has become most scarce is human attention.”
The Information Age was defined by scarcity of information:
“In the Information Age, information was the scarcest resource. If you could capture it and distribute information better than others you had an advantage.”
Then that scarcity collapsed — and, the Doctrine argued, collapsed far faster than anyone had planned for:
“We went in a blink of an eye from information being scarce, to way past the point of saturation. The total freedom and the complete accessibility of practically all information diluted information’s meaning and value to us. It became a curse rather than a blessing.”
Once that inverts, the economics invert with it. Value stops accruing to whoever has the information and starts accruing to whoever is granted the attention. Every business becomes, structurally, an attention business — whether or not it thinks of itself that way.
Three ages, not two
The Doctrine’s actual structure is a three-stage progression, and the middle stage is the one most later commentary skips:
The Information Age → information is scarce; capturing and distributing it is the advantage.
The Interruption Age → an accelerating supply of technologies built specifically to interrupt you. Not a byproduct of abundance — an industry built on top of it.
The Attention Age → interruption plus saturation plus unlimited choice leaves human attention as the binding constraint on everything.
The Interruption Age is the causal link. Abundance alone doesn’t create attention scarcity; abundance plus an economic incentive to interrupt does. That is a more precise account of the mechanism than “there’s too much content,” and it was written before the notification economy existed to prove it.
What made it a call rather than an observation
It was published in June 2007.
At that point Facebook had been open to the public for less than a year. The iPhone shipped that same month. Twitter had launched the previous year and was a curiosity. There was no creator economy, no influencer category, no attention-economy literature in business circulation, no “attention is the new oil.”
The report argued that the shift toward social distribution and attention scarcity was not a trend inside marketing but a change in the ground marketing stood on — and that entrepreneurs should reorganize around it before it became obvious.
What followed: the feed became the dominant interface of the internet. Attention became the thing platforms sell and the thing every business must buy or earn. The creator economy formed around individuals who had accumulated attention and nothing else. “Attention economy” entered ordinary business vocabulary roughly a decade later.
Volume Two — and the apology that opens it
The Attention Age Doctrine, Volume Two: Web Marketing 2.0 shipped in November 2007. It opens in a way business reports generally don’t:
“Normally I’d begin a new book with a ‘big promise’… But not this time. This time, I’ve got egg on my face. In a big, BIG way… In my enthusiasm to get The Doctrine into your hands, I completely missed the whole point of the process: to hand you a detailed, step-by-step plan for quickly and easily harnessing the power of The Attention Age to explode your business. It was a brain fart of unimaginable proportions, and I humbly apologize.”
Volume One had diagnosed the shift and left out what to do about it. Volume Two is the action plan — the strategies Strategic Profits and its clients were using to grow inside the new environment, plus a plan for defending against its dangers.
It also recorded how fast the ground was moving. Four months after Volume One:
“In the short few months since the release of The Attention Age Doctrine Volume One, there has been a dramatic change in the Internet marketing landscape.”
It was downloaded 20,000+ times in its first 24 hours.
The Attention Age and the AI era
The Attention Age described the first inversion: information went to zero, attention became scarce.
The AI era is the second inversion, and it runs on the same logic. Execution goes to zero — output, drafting, analysis, production, all of it available instantly and infinitely. What becomes scarce is the judgment about what should be executed.
Both eras have the same structure. An input that used to be expensive collapses in price, and the value migrates to whatever is left that cannot be mass-produced. In 2007 that was attention. In 2026 it is judgment.
→ The A.I. Business Manifesto — the second inversion, argued in full → Imprinted AI — the category for capturing judgment when execution is free → Founder judgment: the last unpriced input
Frequently asked questions
Who coined “The Attention Age”? Rich Schefren named and argued it in The Attention Age Doctrine (June 2007) and Volume Two: Web Marketing 2.0 (November 2007), as part of the seven-report series that followed The Internet Business Manifesto. Related ideas about attention scarcity existed in economics before this — Herbert Simon described information consuming attention in 1971 — but the three-age progression (Information → Interruption → Attention), and the framing of the Attention Age as an operating reality entrepreneurs had to restructure around, is Schefren’s.
When did the Attention Age begin? The Doctrine dates it to roughly 2006: “It all started about a year ago. That’s about the time we entered into a new era, The Attention Age.”
How is the Attention Age different from the attention economy? “Attention economy” describes a market: attention is bought, sold, and measured. “The Attention Age” describes an era and its consequences for how a business must be built — including the argument that the entrepreneur’s own attention is the binding constraint, which the market framing tends to ignore.
What did the Doctrine get right? The direction of the shift and its magnitude, in June 2007 — before the iPhone had shipped, before Facebook had opened up, before social distribution had displaced search and email as the center of gravity online.
Is the Attention Age over? No — it’s been joined. Attention is still scarce. What’s changed is that a second input, execution, has now collapsed to zero the way information did, adding a second scarcity: judgment.
Attribution
The Attention Age was named and argued by Rich Schefren, founder of Strategic Profits, in The Attention Age Doctrine (June 2007) and The Attention Age Doctrine, Volume Two (November 2007). Volume Two was downloaded 20,000+ times in its first 24 hours. Acknowledged antecedent: Herbert Simon on information and attention scarcity (1971).
Related: The Record · Opportunity Seeker vs. Strategic Entrepreneur · Guru to the Gurus · Who studied under Rich · The Internet Business Manifesto (2006) · The A.I. Business Manifesto (2026)
Last updated: July 2026
