The Gross Attention Product is the Attention Economy’s equivalent to the classical economy’s Gross Domestic Product, which is

the most comprehensive single measure of aggregate economic output. Represents the market value of the total output of the goods and services produced by a nation’s economy. (via business.gov)

Obviously “Gross Attention Product” is meant as a metaphor - though it’s not that obvious whether it is a useful metaphor - for now, let’s just assume that the idea of a “GAP” makes sense, so bear with me
What would a GAP look like, how would you calculate it?
While the worldwide Gross Domestic Product is the sum of all nation’s financial output of physical goods and (not necessarily physical) services within a given time frame, the Gross Attention Product is a measurement of the value of all attention processes that gets aggregated by all internet users within a given time frame. (Note that this excludes any attention that is ‘invested’ offline.).
I’m hesitating to translate this attentional value into money. Rather, it is a currency of its own, much more fundamental and universal than money: I referred to Attention before as the currency of intentionality.
In the following I just outline a few starting points of how one could calculate such a thing - for now I am not concerned about the actual possibilities to do it, but merely interested in proposing and introducing the concept.
Let’s see how one could calculate something like the Gross Attention Product.
Since we’re excluding any offline attention processes, the obvious first step to get an idea of aggregated attention value is the time that people spend online. In the most trivial sense, that’s it. And in fact, that is what is already being used to some extent when firms like Nielsen//NetRatings tells you how much time the average American (or German, or Japanese etc.) user spent online.
But there is much more to this story. Being “online” subsumes a variety of attention activities, ranging from merely reading a news story to commenting on or linking to a page.

I propose two axes to account for the attentional value that is moved from the one who pays attention to the thing or person that receives this attention. Both axes have to be taken into account to calculate the GAP.
The y-axis indicates the type of activity, where the mere consumption of content is naturally considered to be less valuable than interaction by comments, trackbacks, or a link in a blogroll.
The x-axis indicates the popularity of the user who is paying attention - this popularity again is a function of how much attention he receives.

Attention value is indicated by the intensity of the red color. As you can see, the color is saturated in the upper right corner of the plot, i.e. where a very “popular” user is so sold on the content he just consumed that he decides to build an “attention pipeline” (aka link) to the respective article/page.
Of course this is just one out of a number of principles that could be used to account for attention value. E.g., this graph is not suitable to account for situations where one tries to calculate with attention that comes from more than one user.
That’s why we need to incorporate another principle into the GAP formula. I have refered to it before as Social Saliency Maps. To make a long story short (you can read the long story by following the link): Social Saliency Maps are a theoretical tool to account for attentional processes as they happen within communities (situations that involve more than one person).
One simple example feature of Social Saliency is that if you are in a conversation with another person (which in the general case requires you to pay attention to her) and she suddenly directs her gaze (her attention) to another spot in the room (maybe accompanied by a surprised facial expression), it is very likely that you will also look at this spot to find out what’s so interesting about it. Or think of a situation where someone you admire is recommending a book - the probability that you are also going to read it is a function of how strong your admiration towards this person is. This is a first rule of Social Saliency and in fact, it complements and supports the ideas that were introduced in the graph above - why is it good to attract the attention of people that themselves attract a lot of attention? Because it is very likely that the ones who pay attention to them will also pay attention to what they are interested in (–> your stuff).
But there is a second rule of Social Saliency that adds a difficult twist to the story: People tend to direct their attention not only to things (and people) that celebrities, leaders or their friends (your personal celebrities!) find attractive, but there is some kind of social attention gravity that acts between the masses and the individual person: We are generally inclined to be interested in things that were able to attract the attention of large groups of people. The “talk of the town”. (Which is btw tightly coupled into what makes a celebrity a celebrity: Most of the time he or she is known for being known and not for being a great actor / singer / politician etc.. I owe this idea to Georg Franck and his great book “Mentaler Kapitalismus”)
The internet is the perfect platform for this kind of social media, or, rather, it is this social media par excellence. A good example is Digg: Users submit stories/articles which can be dugg or buried by each user, where the former will promote the story to the top (and, with enough “diggs”, to the frontpage) and the latter will demote it until it eventually gets deleted.
So, if you have to decide whether you are going to read a story about Steve Jobs that has been dugg 3 times or whether you go for the article that has already attracted the attention of 55 diggers you will most probably follow the “hype” and join in as the 56th, because this is how we work (though thanks to evolutionary diversity, there will always be a minority of users who will go for the story that is socially less salient).
Now while linking to or commenting on a page can happen unnoticed (yet still has to be incorporated into the Gross Attention Product), each digg is an explicit and public attention transfer - its publicity makes me think that it carries even more attentional value than the usual link. Hence, attention transfers that happen within explicit social media would deserve a higher weight in a Gross Attention Product formula…
Of course all of these thoughts are merely tentative sketches to approach a general idea of how the GAP could look like and what we would need to “calculate” it.

Stay tuned, in the following posts I will try to combine those ideas and sketches to something more structured, read- and digestable. In the meantime, I would be glad to get external input in the comment section!

UPDATE: Due to a personal celebrity’s (aka friend’s) request, I am now calling it the “Gross Attention Product” rather than “Gross Attentional Product”.

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