You will never be a successful artist if you only chase attention

Social media companies have been captured by one word: Attention. It is the ONLY way they know how to drive profits. The only way they make money is if they have your attention.

To paraphrase Cory Doctorow in his famous article on the enshitification of the internet: attention, though itself worthless, is a great way to trick other people (advertisers) into parting with real money. Hey, we have eyeballs, come and show those eyeballs your crap.

Therefore, since they have no other idea how to create value, social platforms have come to see attention as the Holy Grail. It is their only incentive. Whenever they take any action, make any changes, pivot in any way, the end goal is: more attention.

Every decision is filtered through this lens. They don’t care if you’re enjoying yourself, if their platforms are good for humanity, good for artists. They don’t care if you find their apps valuable, as long as they can addict you to them.

And they are highly addictive. According to the Guardian, over half of British teenagers say they feel addicted to social media. We don’t need other people to tell us this, though. We all know it.

I often think of this quote by Jeff Hammerbacher, a data scientist and early Facebook employee, ““The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.” He said that 12 years ago. The internet has only grown more addictive since then.

Because so many of the world’s biggest companies only get richer when they garner more of our attention, Creators all around the world are being convinced that attention is the new marker of creative success. The prevailing narrative is that artists and corporations are now aligned in their incentives: get more attention.

This is false. You will never be a successful artist if you only chase attention. You’ve been lied to. Attention is what they need. You need to create value. Real value.

For Zuck, the more attention he gets on his app, the more money Zuck makes.

For artists, the more attention your art gets online, the more money Zuck makes.

Tech bros have built an economy that no longer rewards value, but rewards attention.

Metrics on social media sites only show us how many people saw our art. How much raw attention our art gets. We do not get any data about: who fell in love with it, whose lives we changed it, who found great value in it, only how much attention it got.

We are told that top of funnel is the only important funnel.

Artists struggle to make money because all we’ve been conditioned and trained to do is get attention.

The worst part, the truly evil part, is that social media platforms enlist artists to make the bulk of the content that drives attention, then, when those artists ask their audience to buy something from them, rather than simply giving attention, the platforms shut off the tap.

We’ve been told that content that overtly drives sales is wrong, because social media companies will literally suppress it, because it is anathema to their business model. They make no money when you sell a piece of art. Only when you make art that gets attention. They want you to drive eye balls to their site, and they don’t want to reward you in anyway. They want to punish you when you come for what is yours, by right. And they do.

It’s like Zuck is standing over the attention tap twisting it on or off depending on how much you align yourself with his incentives. They never want you to capture any of the value you create.

Does attention benefit the Creator?

For the social media giants: attention = money.

For artists and creators, this is not the equation. Attention alone on social media does not equal money for the artist, because the social media giants have already captured all the value. There is nothing left for us.

Attention in general is, of course, necessary for the Creative. We make to connect. We need audiences! We need attention. Part of the creative’s work is to get attention, but it is ONLY a part. For the tech bros, it is the WHOLE.

Making a piece of art that is attention grabbing is not a career plan. It’s a way to make social media companies richer.

Let’s use my latest book We Need Your Art as an example.

To market my book, I focussed on getting attention, because the creative industries tell you that’s what you should strive for, because we have been told that attention IS success.

BUT I found continuously that attention did not equate to money, fans, readers or book sales.

During my book campaign I had three GOLDEN things happen.

1. I got on the Jay Shetty Podcast.

2. I had a ted talk that had hundreds of thousands of views

3. I had several posts go viral (1million+ views) to do with the book

I flew myself on my own dime to LA to be on the Jay Shetty podcast, and that podcast made NO discernible difference to book sales. I got so much attention. Texts from people I haven’t heard from in years, people were like “wow amie, you’re blowing up.” The publishers couldn’t believe I’d got the gig. Attention was abundant. The book sales stayed the same.

I had such an incredible time at my Tedx talk - and I did sell some books in person after the actual event. Two Million people watched a reel of me talking at that event. Zuck would have loved it! Zuck and his minions have told us that’s the holy grail. I can look at the chart on the Penguin portal and there was no spike that week.

The viral posts! What an incredible way to spread my book’s message. There was NO obvious connection between the millions of people who saw that book, and my book sales.

We need to understand that attention DOES NOT EQUAL success. If a million people saw my ted talk, how many of them bought a book? A dozen? Even a thousand would be a terrible hit rate, and I’m sure it wasn’t close to that.

We are now spending whole careers trying to make the thing that best captures the most attention, without ever asking ourselves whether attention is the marker we should be striving for.

Attention does not equate to sales. Attention does not even directly equate to impact.

How did we get here?

In her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff explains that it was a choice to make attention the currency of the internet. It was something the tech companies walked into, eyes open. Google pioneered it, and the others followed.

It was a system companies developed in desperation for profit, unable (or not creative enough) to think of something better. At a loss for a way to turn users into money.

It didn’t have to be that way. There are literally infinite ways the internet COULD operate. Most of which we haven’t invented yet.

The economy is not something real, but something we, people, make every day.

What can we do?

There are greenshoots. There are corners of the internet that have realised that attention is a poor proxy for value, and terrible for the waning spirit of creativity.

Find platforms that have different incentives that are not driven by attention. There is a version of the internet that never had attention as its main driver, and it’s possible that it will return.

We are seeing people rebelling against what is happening, we are seeing greenshoots in places like substack and Patreon.

Substack, for example, only makes money if I CONVERT A SALE. They only win if the writer wins.

I’m about to monetize my substack with one essay a month behind a subscription paywall. I have had multiple people ask me, but aren’t you worried about subscription fatigue? People just are over paying a subscription for a product?

If you’ll excuse some cynicism, I believe people ask this question so often because we’ve told by the social media giants that no one wants to pay for anything WHICH IS THEIR INCENTIVE. Because they don’t want direct payments to artists to become the way of the internet, they want it to stay an attention incentive system.

But people are waking up to the idea that paying creators money is cheaper than wasting the CURRENCY OF YOUR LIFE, the hours of your precious lived experience on media that is there to keep you stuck, rather than intentionally paying artists to give you VALUE.

Substack and Patreon have proved that people DO WANT to support financially valuable content, they WANT to pay for value.

Patreon just announced that fans have used their platform to send $10 billion directly to artists.

Substack surpassed 5 million monthly paid subscribers in March, up from 4 million last September.

Dropout TV—an independent, creator first studio which makes niche content for nerds like the amazing DnD show, Dimension 20—is a subscription based, no ads, streaming service which has done incredibly well against the odds, by making content that really matters and is valuable to people. They also profit share with their employees which is incredibly cool! It’s hard to know how successful Dropout has been, but it’s estimated that it made at least $30 million annually in early 2024, and probably much more now by providing value to an audience that, by the standards of tech giants, is small, but for independent creatives, is massive..

We need to realise that, if people are ready to spend 8 dollars for a single coffee in NYC, (Something they find valuable and enjoyable; James, and Australian, has said that the Blue Bottle at 396 Broadway makes the best flat white he’s ever had) they are also willing to pay for a better, more positive, more valuable internet.

Platforms that directly incentivise and pay creators IS THE ANSWER to this problem. and it is a big fucking problem.

And that idea terrifies the tech bros.

Other than finding better corners of the internet, we can rebelliously and revolutionarily - make art that haunts people, heals people, holds people. We can choose meaning over metrics, depth over virality, value over noise. We can opt out of the attention casino and step into something more honest, more radical: a creative economy built on MEANING. On craft. On actual connection. The tech overlords are terrified of this because they know: the moment we stop letting them mediate all value, the jig is up.

So here’s our answer. Keep your likes, your reach, your algorithmic crumbs. We’ll take our weird art and our handful of fans and we will build something better. That’s the revolution. That’s the rebellion. And it starts when we stop mistaking attention as the ultimate end goal.

Keep making cool stuff, we believe in you,

Love Amie + James.

BIG ESSAY - PROUD OF YOU FOR READING, HERE IS OUR NEWS:

I have launched my prints …

like low key, under the radar, I have launched my prints and originals.

They are very limited edition and they are very beautiful. Check them out here.

EVENTS in august!

OXFORD!

Join Amie McNee and Bev Wass live at Oxford’s iconic Blackwell’s on Saturday, 16 August at 3 PM. We Need Your Art isn’t a how‑to manual about chasing clout or viral likes; it’s a revolutionary plea to create for care, for meaning, for value - not attention.
You'll:

• Discover why your art matters in a world fixated on metrics.

• Learn how to nurture a creative practice—without the burnout.

• Bring your questions, stories, and your spark to conversation with two passionate creatives.

Everything’s free—but the inspiration you’ll leave with? FUCKING PRICELESS :)

CANTERBURY! Break your creative deadlock and join Amie McNee for an electrifying evening of truth, ART, and real talk at Waterstones Canterbury – Rose Lane on Monday 18 August 2025, 6:30 PM