If you work anywhere near media, you'll want to take a long look at this graph. It tells you where Americans direct our attention (in BLUE) and where advertisers pay money to capture our attention (in RED).
-- Takeaway #1: We still love TV.
-- Takeaway #2: Advertisers still love print.
-- Takeaway #3: Audiences move faster than advertisers.
According to this chart -- adapted from a Mary Meeker slideshow excerpted by Bill Gross -- we spend more time engaging with mobile devices than reading print. But print publications still get 25-times more ad money than mobile. Either the eyeballs are moving faster than the advertisers, who will eventually stop paying for print ... or the ad teams don't think a minute spent around mobile ads is worth a minute spend around print ads. Those aren't mutually exclusive.
We can take this chart in a lot of directions. Could print see another mass exodus of money? Is mobile advertising about to explode? I want to talk a bit about Facebook and attention.
Since the Facebook IPO, I've been thinking a lot about attention. Facebook is the deepest and widest social media site in the world. In the online attention food chain, Facebook isn't the lion. It's the Great-White-Shark-Tyrannosaurus-Rex-Lyger hybrid. It eats everybody's lunch, twice, just to make a point. Its user base is one-seventh of the world population. It claims one out of every five page views on the Internet. If we're really moving toward an attention economy, Facebook is poised to dominate.