Years ago, when I had a 9-to-5 job, a coworker came into work excited because someone she knew had gone viral.
“He has to figure out how to capitalize on this,” she said.
He created a Facebook page, got 200 likes, and then… nothing.
His fifteen minutes of fame were just that.
This was in the early 2010s. I remember thinking it was strange. If millions of people had watched him, why didn’t that translate into a real audience? After all, the prevailing wisdom was that attention is currency.
Looking back, I don’t think that’s the whole story. Attention wasn’t the asset. Attention was the event.
People chase virality all the time. The internet has produced millions of these moments.
If attention alone created lasting influence, every viral moment would launch a career. But it doesn’t. What matters is what happens after someone pays attention.
A video clip might be how you discover someone, but you don’t feel like you know them after 30 seconds. That happens after spending hours with their work — watching their videos, listening to podcasts, reading articles.
When someone discovers you, do they have an archive of content to explore? Because attention has to go somewhere or it evaporates.
If you’ve spent years creating videos, podcasts, interviews, livestreams, and articles, any single spark of attention becomes the front door to something much larger.
An archive doesn’t just retain attention. It converts attention into familiarity. The more time people spend exploring it, the more they get to know you.
For most of the twentieth century, celebrities were manufactured by institutions — movie studios, TV networks, record labels, magazines. Those gatekeepers controlled distribution. If they put you in front of millions, the odds of becoming famous were high.
But the relationship stayed distant: a two-hour movie, a 30-minute episode, a late-night TV interview. You always saw the polished version.
Today’s creators are different.
They don’t just produce finished works. They produce themselves.
The early internet taught us that attention mattered. But the modern internet is teaching us that attention is only the start.
Attention gets you noticed.
