The New Attention Merchants: Expanding the SocialFi Frontier

SocialFi, a category combining social networks with financial mechanisms, is presented as a way for users and creators to become "attention merchants" who own and profit from the attention assets they generate, rather than only being consumers or the product. The article cites Tim Wu's 2016 term "attention merchants" for publishers and platforms that have profited from user attention. Examples include Fantasy, a fantasy sports trading card game built on X's social graph, and Friendtech, where users buy chat access passes early, and memecoin launchpads like Pump and Ape.store.