Ben Thompson is a brilliant tech analyst – the following quote is from his latest post, emphasis mine:
While the home telephone enabled real-time communication, and the web passive communication, messaging enables constant communication. Conversations are never ending, and friends come and go at a pace dictated not by physicality, but rather by attention. And, given that we are all humans and crave human interaction and affection, we are more than happy to give massive amounts of attention to messaging, to those who matter most to us, and who are always there in our pockets and purses.
This, by extension, dictates that messaging is incredibly valuable: in a world of effectively infinite content and zero distribution costs the only scarce resource is attention, and if messaging is indeed the recipient of “massive amounts of attention” it has massive value.
