Media pricing still runs on the impression — a unit invented when an impression meant a full-page print ad, now stretched to cover everything from a skippable pre-roll to a pixel that technically rendered below the fold. Attention measurement firms have spent five years building the correction. Applying it changes more than buyers expect.
The method
Take any channel's effective CPM. Divide by the average attentive seconds an impression actually earns — eye-tracking and audibility panel data are now available for every major format. The output is price per attentive minute: what a real human-minute of attention costs on each channel.
What falls out
On the panel data we aggregated: mid-feed social video earns 1.3 attentive seconds per impression on average — its cheap CPM becomes $55+ per attentive minute. Podcast mid-rolls earn 19+ attentive seconds; a "premium" $22 CPM becomes roughly $9 per attentive minute. Newsletter placements land in between. Out-of-home is wildly variable. Nothing else in the plan moves the ranking much: audio and owned channels top nearly every attention-adjusted plan we've seen, and the formats that dominate budgets sit at the bottom.
Why plans haven't moved yet
Partly institutional inertia; mostly measurement asymmetry — the cheap-attention channels also have the best-instrumented dashboards, and nobody gets fired for a great-looking ROAS screenshot. But attention-adjusted planning is spreading through the agencies that answer to CFOs rather than platforms. When the reallocation comes, it will look sudden. It won't have been.