The Cost of One Minute of Attention in 2025
#EarnedAttention
Attention is valuable. Creating something that people want to spend their attention on is hard.
I started thinking about how people spend their attention as a podcaster hoping to earn my audiences attention. And, for the last couple years thousands of people spend 30 to 40 minutes listening to Threat Vector every week. They are choosing to give us their attention and I’m grateful for that. But what does that mean for our business? What is this attention worth? And to be really specific “Is what I am doing actually valuable to Palo Alto Networks?” As the saying goes, “every yes is a no” so for me and our teams to say yes to podcasting, we are saying no to something else.
To answer that question, I started to research how to quantify the attention that a podcast gets. By going directly at the problem, I struck out. But, I did find an article by Chris Marshall that gave me some clues and eventually formed the basis of my “earned attention” formula.Marshall’s research concluded that one minute of attention in 2021 was worth $1.03.
So let's start with the formula components. We already have a basis for the value of one minute of attention - $1.03. Next I look at each show and find the number of downloads and the length of the episode.
To calculate how much an episode is worth in earned attention I multiply the number of downloads (D) by 80% of the show total length (L). Then I multiply that number by $1.03. You might be asking where did the 80% come from and why is it there? It’s a hedge. While I would love to tell you that I believe that people listen to 100% of every episode, that’s extremely unlikely. There is a solid body of research that says 96% of podcast listeners listen to 100% of each episode, and maybe some that will go back and listen to an episode or parts later. But its just as likely that people are skipping the intro, the close or even listening to part of but not all of episodes on occasion. I think that assuming that 80% of the episode gets listened is a safe bet. If you are doing this calculation for your podcast, adjust to match your data.
So, for a show with 1,000 downloads and a 30 minute duration, the calculation would be (1000 * (30*80%) * $1.03 = $24,720 in earned attention.
But when we launched the podcast, I could count total downloads, calculate download growth, count comments and emails about the podcast. But I could not convert those into a dollar based value. The earned attention calculation helped flip that narrative. However, one thing that has bothered me was that I was using using a value from 2021.
Now, looking more research from Chris and others I’m updating that part of the equation based on data from a wide range of sources (see below) and have an updated value for 2025. Actually I have a range of $1.24 - $2.40 per minute. To stay conservative, I am
guess is one minute of attention is worth $1.40.
And because I am estimating and pulling from a variety of sources (links below), I am being conservative. For transparency, my range is $1.24 - $2.40 per minute)
References
Chris’s Original Article: Paid Attention: Quantifying the Attention Economy
Visual Capitalist: How Total Spend by U.S. Advertisers Has Changed, Over 20 Years
galbithink.org: U.S. Annual Advertising Spending Since 1919
abbeymecca: Global Ad Spending to Hit $1 Trillion in 2025 – What It Means for Businesses, B2B Marketers, and Nonprofits
Publift: Advertising in the US - Statistics and Facts
Wall Street Journal: Ad Revenue Predicted to Top $1 Trillion This Year for the First Time
EMarketer: Worldwide total media ad spending will cross the $1 trillion threshold this year
Social Sprout: The attention economy is the actual economy—and social media
User Centrics Magazine: After attention: Trust in the age of digital abundance The ‘attention equation’: Winning the right battles for consumer attention