The Hidden Cost of Free Attention
Attention has never been easier to manufacture. It has also never been cheaper to waste.
YouTube creators upload 500 hours of video every minute. TikTok users post 34 million videos a day. The creator economy surpassed £160 billion in 2024. Organic reach on Facebook has collapsed to under 2%. Total daily media consumption has barely moved in five years.
The supply of content has exploded. The supply of human attention has not. What changed is the cost of generating visibility. For founders and operators building businesses on top of visibility, this shift quietly destroys value.
Attention became a commodity
Ten years ago, getting noticed was the hard part. Distribution was expensive and controlled by broadcasters, publishers and rights holders. Today, anyone with a phone and a basic understanding of platform mechanics can generate a spike. AI tools accelerate production. Algorithms reward novelty over substance. Trend cycles compress from weeks to hours.
The result is a market flooded with impressions that nobody remembers. Organic social traffic to retail websites dropped 30% in 2023. Engagement rates on Instagram sit below 0.5%, and on Facebook closer to 0.15%.
Attention is abundant. But it is increasingly shallow, short lived and disconnected from commercial outcomes. Businesses treating visibility as a proxy for progress are spending more to reach people who remember less and buy slower.
The gap between looking and buying
Here is where the economics break down.
Average conversion rates in direct to consumer ecommerce sit at 1.8%. In sports, that figure drops to 1.47%. The engagement to purchase drop off rate across DTC averages 94%. Customer acquisition costs rose 40% between 2023 and 2025. Return on ad spend in mature markets declined 17% in a single year.
These are not anomalies. They are the predictable consequence of a market where generating attention became trivially easy while converting it stayed difficult and expensive.
The brands most at risk are not the ones with low visibility. They are the ones with high visibility and no commercial infrastructure beneath it. A million views and no pathway to revenue is not a marketing win. It is a capital leak.
Fireworks without foundations
In sport, the pattern is familiar. A new league launches with a celebrity ambassador, a high production brand film and a press cycle full of ambitious claims. Social numbers spike. Coverage appears. The deck looks impressive.
Six months later, the spike has flattened. There is no retention system to hold the audience it attracted. No data capture to understand who showed up. No pricing architecture to convert interest into recurring revenue. The launch generated attention. It did not generate revenue.
This is not a failure of marketing creativity. It is a failure of commercial sequencing. Ticketing pages with no data capture. Influencer spikes with no remarketing layer. The fireworks went off before anything existed to capture what they exposed.
The same dynamic plays out beyond sport. BuzzFeed reached 100 million monthly users and watched revenue fall 26%. Vice built an audience of 50 million and filed for bankruptcy. Ligue 1 targeted €1 billion in annual media rights, settled for half that, and saw clubs face a 60% drop in broadcast revenue overnight. Each optimised for reach. None built for revenue.
Who carries the most risk
This is not a marketing problem. It is a business model problem.
VC-backed brands chasing valuation optics are particularly vulnerable. When investor sentiment shifted in 2023, 75% of institutional investors began prioritising profitability over growth. Private equity firms increased marketing ROI reviews by 30%. The median hold period for PE-backed companies extended from 5.5 years to seven. The tolerance for spend without return has evaporated.
New sports properties over investing in ambassador deals face the same correction. Global sponsorship rights fees reached £78 billion in 2024, but 74% of brands reduced their total number of sponsorships that year. Nearly half renegotiated deals to exit or shift assets. The era of writing cheques for brand awareness without measurable commercial return is closing.
Creators dependent on algorithms carry a different version of the same risk. Organic reach continues to decline while 75% of marketers increased paid social spend in 2023 just to maintain baseline visibility. Platform dependency is not a strategy. It is a liability with variable pricing.
And sports properties misreading their audience face perhaps the most expensive correction of all. Subscription fatigue drove 47% of consumers to cancel at least one service in 2023. Average DTC churn sits at 6.5%. Attention that does not convert into retained, paying relationships compounds the cost of acquisition without building long-term value.
The warning signs
Certain behaviours signal that a business is approaching this trap.
Overpromising on early traction. Positioning that relies on aspiration rather than evidence. Overproduction of content without corresponding commercial systems. KPIs built around impressions, followers and views rather than acquisition cost, retention rate and lifetime value. These are not growing pains. They are signs that the business is optimising for applause instead of income.
The businesses that avoid the trap look different. They obsess over their first 1,000 genuine fans before scaling. They build cohesive brand foundations that support pricing and positioning from day one. They align marketing activity directly to revenue targets. And they treat infrastructure, including data capture, retention mechanics and conversion design, as prerequisite to amplification. Not an afterthought.
Where the misalignment lives
The gap between attention and revenue rarely sits in a single department. It lives in the space between functions.
Marketing teams optimise for reach because that is what they are measured on. Commercial teams are brought in too late to shape what marketing builds. Revenue planning starts after the audience already exists, rather than before it is acquired. Execution is under resourced because the budget went to production. And the KPIs that connect activity to income either do not exist or arrive quarterly when the damage is already compounding.
This is not a creative problem. It is a plumbing problem. The organisations that close the gap are the ones that treat marketing, revenue and product as a single system rather than adjacent disciplines with separate scorecards.
The shift
The businesses that will win the next cycle, in sport and beyond, share one characteristic. They build the mechanism that converts interest before they spend money generating it.
They know who they are building for. They know what that audience is worth. They know how to capture, retain and monetise the interest they generate. And they sequence investment accordingly, putting infrastructure before amplification and conversion before awareness.
Attention is not the asset. Converted attention is. Everything else is cost.
