What accounts for such wide disparities in media monetization? Part of it stems from well- understood factors such as the underlying industry dynamics and content scarcity, the mix of consumer demographics, and the relative effectiveness of advertising across media. However, new McKinsey research shows that traditional commercial factors such as consumer value, platform sophistication, and industry structure—or what we call the “commercial quotient”— explain only about two-thirds of the variance in attention monetization. The other third is driven by the quality of consumers’ attention, or the “attention quotient,” a factor that hasn’t been front and center in most discussions about media monetization until now. Based on our survey of 3,000 US consumers, we have developed an attention equation that combines these two quotients to measure the true value of time consumers spend with different media formats—and for the content and brands they engage with (Exhibit 4). In the process, it helps explain over three-fourths of the variability in monetization for different nonlive mediums. 4 The attention quotient consists of two primary components: consumers’ level of focus, or how actively engaged they are with the content, and the job to be done, or why they are consuming the content. Taken together, these components have significant predictive power on total monetization, including advertising and nonadvertising. Level of focus Our research revealed several insights about where and how consumers’ focus differs across media: — In-person experiences elicit the highest levels of focus , perhaps not surprising given the reaction the person sitting next to you in a movie theater might have if you started scrolling through video reels on your phone. — Books (digital and physical) engage audiences to a comparable degree with live experiences (high focus: 81 percent versus 71 to 88 percent, respectively), far higher than other text-based content (62 percent for newspapers or magazines) and most other forms of entertainment. — Console and PC gaming is the only digital medium that gets close to live levels of focus (high focus: 73 percent versus 71 to 88 percent, respectively), far higher than other forms of video-based content (the next highest is streaming video, at 57 percent). — In the digital realm, communal experiences correlate with focus . Video games and streaming video are the most communal forms of digital media (about 40 percent of consumption time is spent with others), eliciting higher focus than more solitary activities such as social video or mobile gaming. 4 While live mediums follow a similar trend to that described in the equation—greater attention drives greater monetization— their outlier monetization versus nonlive events requires a separate equation to model. Statistical outputs of the attention equation that follow apply to monetization of nonlive events. The missing piece of the attention equation 8 The ‘attention equation’: Winning the right battles for consumer attention