The Attention Economy Has a Conversion Problem

Last year, I shared an update on where we believed the creator economy was heading, and how Formless intended to align with that future by building a more creator-aligned product: one focused on ownership, economics, and long-term sustainability.

Since then, we’ve been building and pressure-testing our assumptions about what it actually takes to provide a valuable service.

What’s become clear is:

• The media industry doesn’t have a creation problem; supply is abundant.
• It has a distribution problem; discovery and monetization are centralized, media is priced as a commodity, and value concentrates at the top as supply scales.

Where Distribution Breaks Down

In an environment of abundance and fragmented attention, outcomes are shaped by distribution dynamics rather than creative quality. Data from Music Business Worldwide makes this hard to ignore.

• Streaming platforms now host ~250M tracks
• 96.2% of uploads are independent or DIY
• 88% of tracks receive fewer than 1,000 plays, generating effectively $0 in streaming revenue
• 0.2% of tracks account for ~50% of streams

These outcomes reflect how attention concentrates at the top as supply scales, leaving the majority of creators effectively invisible within the system.

As supply continues expanding, with more than 100,000 new tracks uploaded every day competing for a fixed pool of attention, discovery becomes a zero-sum game, and the probability of monetization collapses for the vast majority of artists.

The same structural pattern exists in video. Platforms routinely retain 30–45%+ of gross revenue across ads, subscriptions, and app-store fees, while creators assume production risk and lose direct access to their audiences, reinforcing the same dynamic of centralized distribution, commodity pricing, and concentrated upside.

The result is an industry with unprecedented reach and increasingly fragile economics for the people creating the value.

Why Attention Doesn’t Convert Into Value

At scale, attention isn’t linear. More content doesn’t produce more value. More content fragments focus. McKinsey’s 2025 Attention Equation captures this clearly, arguing that value comes from focused, intentional attention rather than total time spent.

Music is a clear example of this imbalance. Relative to how much attention it commands, digital music is one of the most under-monetized forms of media, generating roughly $0.12 per hour of consumption, according to McKinsey. People listen constantly, but the dominant economic rails are optimized for background consumption and commodity pricing, not focused engagement or sustainable creator economics. 

The issue isn’t demand; it’s that the system fails to convert attention into durable value for the people creating it.

Why Direct-to-Consumer Rails Matter Now

Direct-to-consumer is now the fastest-growing segment of creator revenue, growing ~20–30% YoY across music, video, and publishing. Not because creators want to abandon platforms. But, because they need ways to extend discovery into ownership and monetization, especially at the long tail.

This success can be tied to the fact that the current media stack doesn’t lack reach, it lacks intent. 

McKinsey’s research highlights something incumbents struggle to capture: focus correlates directly with spend. Consumers in the top quartile of focus spend twice as much as those in the bottom quartile.  In other words, value isn’t driven by super-users or passive consumption, it’s driven by high-intent moments like purchasing, supporting, participating in revenue splits, and resharing.

When economics are tied directly to engagement, attention behaves differently. Discovery lasts longer, participation deepens, and value compounds because upside is linked to focused intent rather than passive consumption.

This distinction matters enormously for the long tail. Existing platforms are effective at generating consumption, but structurally limited in how that attention compounds into value for the long tail.

Most platforms are structurally optimized for scale: maximizing total engagement across massive catalogs. This approach works for top-of-funnel discovery, but struggles to support the next step: turning emerging or niche interest into sustainable economics for those creators who don’t already sit at the top.

Direct-to-consumer rails flip that equation by enabling:

• Durable, intentional creator-fan relationships that compounds over time
• Ownership of customer data and relationships, rather than abstracted or rented audiences
• Incentive-aligned participation that turns fans into active promoters and distributors
• Transparent pricing and payouts tied to specific moments of intent
• Flexible monetization surfaces (bundles, tips, access, memberships) that map to different levels of fan engagement

But infrastructure alone doesn’t fix the system.

What We Learned

Early on, we assumed that giving creators better ownership primitives and payout tooling would be enough. It wasn’t.

Creators need more than better monetization capabilities. They need access to: consumer demand, thoughtful discovery mechanisms, and seamless ways to align with audiences. Without that, even the best infrastructure sits idle. 

In 2025, we made a deliberate shift toward building an application layer on top of the infrastructure to connect discovery and demand to ownership and payouts.

We’ve separated SHARE into two clear layers:

• Share.stream is a direct-to-consumer media marketplace focused on discovery, curation, and purchasing, and designed to surface high-intent participation
• SHARE Protocol is an engine that powers payments, revenue sharing, splits, and programmable ownership, while ensuring economics remain transparent, flexible, and creator-aligned

What we’ve learned building share.stream is that distribution doesn’t fail because creators lack tools. It fails because attention rarely converts into participation. In response, our business is evolving into a model where:

• Discovery is designed to surface high-intent moments, rather than maximize passive consumption
• Monetization is native to the experience, not an external or downstream add-on
• Creators control pricing, data, and relationships, expanding lifetime value per fan
• Economic value compounds through ownership and participation, instead of being diluted by scale

Together, this directly addresses the long-tail problem, giving creators a clear path to transform attention into direct relationships and durable economics.

What We’re Focused on Next

In 2026, we're focused on turning attention into durable economics for creators.

This is where revenue sharing matters, not as a feature, but as an attention mechanism.

Our 2026 priorities are grounded in the insight that in an environment of infinite supply, value is created by focused, intentional attention, not raw consumption.

We have a clear set of execution priorities:

• Build a consumer experience that reliably drives return usage: Use AI-powered, personalized discovery to provide relevant content recommendations that consistently meet intent and turn focused attention into real economic activity.
• Increase content density through creator, distributor, and label partnerships: Ensure that when users arrive with specific interests, there is enough relevant, high-quality content available for discovery to actually convert into engagement and purchasing. 
• Grow creators and consumers together by making revenue sharing easy to activate and extend: Increase the reach and visibility of revenue sharing by integrating it into key touchpoints (release, discovery, and purchase) so creators can turn attention into participation, promotion, and lasting value.
• Deploy a programmable, tokenized economic layer that rewards participation: Use a token to reward actions like publishing, purchasing, and supporting content so value accrues to the people strengthening the ecosystem, rather than being diluted by scale alone.

Formless has moved beyond commoditized distribution and built an ecosystem that converts attention into durable economics for creators and consumers alike.