Welcome to Attention Matters, the newsletter from Storythings which gives you practical insights and tools on how to tell better stories and grow your audiences’ attention.
Hello!
Exactly 15 years ago today, on March 11th 2011, I registered a new company, booked a dot com domain, and (v important at the time) claimed the twitter handle for Storythings. I’d spent the previous decade working in digital teams at the BBC and Channel 4 (and the decade before that making digital art), and I wanted to see how new digital technology was going to change other industries outside of broadcasting. Storythings was a way to broaden my horizons and learn about the impact of digital on the music, film & TV, publishing, non-profit, and most recently B2B sectors.
The most surprising and important lesson I learned is that digital technology doesn’t change industries - it changes people. It’s only when tech is adopted by users at scale, and helps us all gain new skills, that it then changes the industries we all use and rely on.
When I talk about this with clients, I like to zoom out and suggest that there have been two major new superpowers that we have all learnt in the last 25 years through using digital technology, and we are on the cusp of learning a third.
Superpower 1: Search
The first is search. If you used text to search a database in the early 90s, you were either a researcher or a librarian. The early web was built around directories and portals like AOL and Yahoo!, who wanted to host all the information themselves and keep you on their site, not send you away somewhere else. Then Google came along and introduced search as an interface to the web, and everything changed.
The pace of that change, and how quickly search became the dominant way we interacted with content was extraordinary. When Google started in 1998, it was responding to around 10,000 searches a day. By 2006, it was getting 10,000 every second. In just a decade, we all learned how to type search requests, evaluate the results, and use that to find the information we need. We now all do it hundreds of times a day, and the content industry built an entire sector - Search Enging Optmisation - to respond to this new superpower.
Superpower 2: Scheduling
The second superpower is not as obvious, partly because it wasn’t the result of a single new technology - as was the case with Google and search - but in reaction to a combination of technologies. When the iPhone was launched in 2006, it put this incredible network of content into our pockets, at arms reach every single moment of the day. Add social media apps, notifications, podcasts and streaming video, and suddenly we all had a new problem - how do we manage our attention when we can spend every waking moment looking at content?
In response to this, I think the second superpower we have all learned is scheduling - making decisions about how we manage our attention, what we choose to give our attention to, and often how we resist the siren call of these shiny black mirrors we carry around with us everywhere.
When I worked in broadcasting, schedulers were the most powerful people, able to add or take away millions of viewers by shifting your show earlier or later. Now, we make those decisions for ourselves (or at least try to), deciding whether to carry on watching that Netflix show, listen to a podcast, message a friend or scroll through our feeds.
In response, companies shifted to behaviour based ‘for you’ feeds and subscription models, that try to lock us into a relationship by giving us more of what they think we want. The way to get your content seen is no longer just about SEO, but about ARC - Acquisition, Retention and Churn.
Superpower 3: Directing?
So, as Storythings hits its 15th birthday, what new superpower are we likely to learn in the next 15 years? AI is already changing the way we look for information - according to Growtika research some of the most popular Tech publications have lost 58% of search traffic since 2024.
Using AI to find content is different from using search, a social feed, or a subscription. We now use conversation as a way of interacting with vast networks of content. But it’s a particular kind of conversation. When we instruct an agent or LLM, we get the best results by giving it context alongside the request. We tell it how to perform a task, give it boundaries, suggestions or even documentation to help it understand what we want it to do.
Some people have compared this to middle management, saying that we’re all learning to be team leaders, with LLMs as our junior workers. But when I look at the most creative uses of AI, I think people are being more playful than that. They’re asking AI to play roles, or to imagine identities and contexts that influence the AI’s behaviour. As users, we’re behaving a lot more like a Director than a Manager - using context and feedback to iterate a task until you get the results you need.
How Superpowers have shaped the way we make content
If search lead to us all organising our content for SEO, and scheduling led to the adoption of discovery algorithms and subscription models, how will directing change the way we help audiences find and use our content?
I wrote last time about the value of archives for AI discovery, which is important, but it’s just the beginning. I think the most interesting and innovative idea is to think about how you can support users who want bring context and iterative feedback to the way they navigate content. It’s possible to imagine a future where content is a fluid landscape you can explore and remodel, not just a static resource you can access.
A interesting example of this is how the author Steven Johnson (who we’ve had the pleasure to work with at Storythings) is building interactive resources from his book research using Google’s NotebookLM. These are not just repositories of links, but interactive resources you can explore by directing an LLM, curating and combining your own journey through the research from his books.
In another 15 years, when Storythings is 30, maybe we’ll be making resources like this for our clients - interactive archives of content that users will direct their agents to explore, iteratively building something far more powerful than a search engine or feed.
Personally, I can’t wait to start building something like this. If you’d like to work with us at Storythings on a trial project, hit reply and let me know!
See you next time,
Matt
