Attention Arbitrage

My first corporate job was testing video games at Activision.  Every now and then I would be caught playing games that were already tested.  Now I find that both the gig and hobby have been outsourced to China, and with the time I've put into WoW, I've thought of tapping into this hidden economy.

"It's unimaginable how big this is," says Chen Yu, 27, who employs 20 full-time gamers here in Fuzhou. "They say that in some of these popular games, 40 or 50 percent of the players are actually Chinese farmers."

I'm suprised Steve Gillmor isn't sniffing out that the future of attention is being played out in these economies.  As Edward Castronova says: "The cost of someone's time is much bigger in America than in China."  Now I'm thinking of outsourcing my email time to an offshore administrative assistant.

Disturbing trend, yes.  Fun stuff, indeed.

Comments

[Dennis Howlett]

Ahem Ross - in the business world end of the blogosphere, Vinnie Marchandani has been writing about this for a while, EDS are in on the act now as are others whose links I can't recall right now. I've done my share of this as well - look under Outsourcing Offshoring category...

[Pete Cashmore]

You could say that Amazon's MTurk is a massive experiment in outsourcing attention - it allows people with more money than time to outsource their tasks to those with more time than money.