Bangladesh’s economic landscape is often highlighted for its labor force, manufacturing sector, and remittances, yet a crucial economic asset that often goes unnoticed in policy discourse and investment strategies is attention.
Each day, millions of Bangladeshis dedicate significant time to platforms like YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, mobile games, and messaging apps. This attention, quantified by time spent, engagement levels, and cultural impact, is already a commodity being traded. The issue lies not in the existence of an attention market in Bangladesh but rather in the failure to acknowledge and harness its potential.
In the digital age, attention operates as a valuable commodity, with platforms leveraging it for advertising revenue, creators converting it into income, and brands utilizing it to drive demand. Unlike physical exports, attention requires no physical infrastructure or inventory and can swiftly traverse borders without friction.
Bangladesh possesses three key advantages in this market: a sizable young population, widespread mobile internet access, and a strong affinity for short-form, social-centric content. Nevertheless, the full value of attention generated in Bangladesh is often not captured locally but rather exported inadvertently through global platforms that disburse earnings in foreign currencies.
On a per-user basis, Bangladeshi attention ranks among the most cost-effective globally, with low CPMs, limited brand budgets, and modest local advertising sophistication. This positioning makes Bangladesh a high-volume, low-cost reservoir of attention, leading to market arbitrage opportunities.
For instance, a Bangladeshi content creator may earn in USD from YouTube, a direct-to-consumer brand can acquire local attention inexpensively and convert it into sales from diaspora customers abroad, and a freelancer can leverage a local following on platforms like LinkedIn for international contracts. The origin of attention may be local, but its value is realized on a global scale.
Digital platforms effectively function as currency converters, translating Bangladeshi time into foreign ad revenue, local cultural relevance into global impact, and low-cost attention into high-value outcomes. Consequently, numerous digital-native businesses in Bangladesh, ranging from content studios to niche direct-to-consumer brands, exhibit a more outward-facing orientation than traditional small and medium enterprises, even if they primarily target domestic audiences.
In essence, Bangladesh is exporting attention akin to its export of labor, without the need for visas, factories, or intermediaries. Relying solely on large manufacturers to drive global expansion overlooks this strategic opportunity.
While numerous Bangladeshis are already engaged in this attention-based economy – from creators monetizing global platforms to agencies managing campaigns for international clients – this sector remains unofficially unrecognized as an export industry. The absence of mechanisms to track attention flows, link incentives to monetized reach, or incorporate attention as an economic factor hampers the sector’s formal growth potential.
Despite operating quietly, this attention-driven economy stands as a highly capital-efficient growth engine for Bangladesh. The success of Ghorerbazar, a trusted food brand among Bangladeshi expatriates in various countries, underscores the effectiveness of building a Bangladeshi-global brand through attention before logistics.
Traditional economic models struggle to quantify the value of attention, as it does not neatly fit into trade metrics, moves in unconventional banking channels, and is dispersed across individuals and platforms rather than concentrated in large enterprises. However, overlooking the significance of attention can yield negative repercussions.
Countries that grasp the importance of attention early on invest in creators, media infrastructure, and digital storytelling capabilities, whereas those that fail to do so inadvertently become mere suppliers of raw attention, exporting value without reaping the benefits. Bangladesh risks falling into the latter category unless there is a paradigm shift in how attention is perceived.
If attention were officially recognized as an exportable asset, numerous changes would ensue. Creators would be acknowledged as micro-exporters, digital media businesses could access export incentives, metrics on reach, engagement, and audience data would be tracked alongside revenue, and capital would flow more readily into ventures prioritizing audience engagement. Most significantly, young Bangladeshis would understand that attention is not solely a form of consumption but a means of production.
The issue in Bangladesh is not a lack of opportunities but rather a failure to acknowledge where value is already being generated. The attention market is not a hypothetical concept; it is a functional, global entity that is expanding daily. Digital media serves as the conduit, transforming local engagement into foreign value routinely.
The pertinent question is no longer whether Bangladesh possesses an attention economy but rather whether it will continue exporting attention unintentionally or opt to intentionally cultivate, own, and scale this valuable resource.