Income Inequality in the Attention Economy

The World Wide Web may be viewed as a gigantic market for information. In this market there are producers (au- thors) and consumers (readers) and the currency for infor- mation is attention. In this paper we examine the distri- bution of attention across the World Wide Web. Through study of the habits of web users, we conclude that the cur- rency of attention is highly concentrated on a relatively small number of web resources, and that the rich appear to be getting slightly richer over time. We also study the eect of search engines on the distribution of attention, and conclude that search engines produce a more uniform distri- bution of attention than generic surfing habits. Finally, we show that the observed distribution of attention is in sub- stantial disagreement with the distribution that is suggested by the random surfer model embodied in the PageRank al- gorithm.