Who pays for the attention war

You come to an app because you want to do something. Organise a day. Finish a task. Understand where your time went.

We think the effort behind that app should be directed towards making those things easier. That is why the competition to capture attention bothers us so much. An engineer can improve a tool. A designer can make a difficult action understandable. Someone who understands human behaviour can help people follow through on their own intentions.

Those same abilities can be used to create another interruption, another manufactured urgency and another reason you are supposed to buy something today.

The choice of what to build is also a choice of what kind of business to become.

What the accounts actually show

There are large software companies whose sales and marketing expenses exceed research and development by a wide margin.

The following figures come from annual regulatory filings. Amounts are in millions of US dollars, under GAAP. The final column is our calculation using each company’s reported total operating expenses. 1 2 3

The categories matter. Sales and marketing includes people, commissions and other commercial costs as well as advertising. R&D is not the entire cost of delivering a product. These companies report cost of revenue separately from the OPEX denominator used above; the figures are accounting expenses, not a complete cash budget. 1 2 3

The table supports a specific statement: in some major software businesses, the commercial operation is substantially larger than the R&D expense category. It also shows that this pattern is not universal. Atlassian’s R&D expense is more than twice its marketing and sales expense.

Large marketing costs alone do not establish manipulation. They do make the allocation of resources worth discussing.

How everyone ends up shouting

Imagine several businesses trying to reach the same people. One sends more messages to be noticed. Another responds by sending more. Each sees a reason to increase its effort, while the recipient gets a noisier day.

Economists Simon Anderson and André de Palma formalised this mechanism in Shouting to Be Heard in Advertising. In their model, advertising clutter can encourage additional messages, dissipating advertisers’ profits; the advertisers would prefer a situation with less shouting. This is a theoretical result about incentives, not a measurement of every advertising market. 4

It captures a recognisable problem: a strategy can make sense to each participant and still produce a system that the participants would rather escape.

The user is also part of that system. Every company may want a larger share of the same person’s attention. None can give that person a longer day.

The cost that does not fit the campaign dashboard

We object to treating another person’s interruption as a free input. The sender gets a chance at a conversion. The recipient gets another thing to assess, reject, close or remember.

The OECD’s 2022 review of dark commercial patterns describes possible collective harms, including weakened competition and lost trust. It also discusses incentives for firms to compete through manipulative interfaces. The damage can extend beyond the immediate transaction when people become less willing to trust honest offers as well. 5

Our conclusion is ethical: a higher conversion rate does not settle whether an interaction was worth creating.

We would rather devote more effort to features people deliberately use, clearer documentation, reliable software and support that helps someone complete their task. Useful communication has a place in that work. Wearing a person down does not.

Survival is not an exemption from ethics

We understand the argument that a business must compete to survive. Building software involves uncertainty, salaries, maintenance and bills.

But survival does not give a company ownership of the customer’s attention. It does not justify disguising an advertisement, manufacturing urgency or continuing to push after a person has made their choice.

If the shared environment becomes more intrusive each time a company optimises its own numbers, everybody who uses that environment has a reason to object. Some businesses may profit from it. That does not remove the costs borne by the people living through it.

We want to help change what counts as a successful product: something people choose because it improves their day.

Our choice at Fair Ninja

We will explain what we make. We will publish the reasoning behind our choices. We want people who need our tools to be able to find and understand them.

If you do not need them, we will respect that.

We will not follow you around the internet with ads, bombard your inbox with marketing or sell your personal data. We want to earn money by offering useful services at a price you can understand.

Better tools, including AI, give us opportunities to build more effectively. Our ambition is to pass some of that progress on to users through useful capabilities, accessible products and fair prices.

Human intelligence deserves better work than exploiting human attention.

Sources

1. Salesforce, Form 10-K for the year ended 31 January 2026, results of operations and expense definitions. SEC filing.

2. monday.com, Form 20-F for the year ended 31 December 2025, results of operations and expense definitions. SEC filing.

3. Atlassian, Form 10-K for the year ended 30 June 2026, results of operations and expense definitions. SEC filing.

4. Simon P. Anderson and André de Palma, Shouting to Be Heard in Advertising, Management Science 59(7), 2013, pp. 1545–1556. Published paper.

5. OECD, Dark Commercial Patterns, OECD Digital Economy Papers 336, October 2022, particularly the discussion of competition and consumer trust. Report.