The Attention Merchants

Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor and policy advocate, traces the century-long rise of industries that harvest human attention and resell it to advertisers. He opens with a 2012 case in which a financially struggling California school district sold corporate advertising access to its students, illustrating what he considers a broader norm: "nearly every bit of our lives is commercially exploited to the extent it can be" (5). Wu treats attention as a commodity comparable to wheat or crude oil and frames the industry's winning strategy as seeking out times and spaces previously closed to commerce. His purpose is not to judge the attention economy but to help readers "see the terms plainly, and, seeing them plainly, demand bargains that reflect the life you want to live" (7).

Wu locates the origin of the attention merchant's business model in 1833, when Benjamin Day launched the New York Sun at a penny per copy, selling the paper below cost and depending entirely on advertising revenue. Day filled the paper with lurid crime stories, and competitors pushed content further toward sensationalism. The Sun published a fabricated series about life on the moon, which Wu characterizes as the invention of "fake news" (18). In Paris, lithographer Jules Chéret pioneered large, colorful commercial posters that seized passersby's attention. When the poster craze provoked civic backlash and authorities imposed restrictions, Wu identifies the first instance of a recurring pattern he calls the "revolt": An attention industry's overreach triggers popular resistance and forces a renegotiation of terms.

In the early twentieth century, advertising innovator Claude C. Hopkins, a former evangelical preacher, applied a preacher's understanding of desire to selling patent medicines, most notably Liquozone, an essentially worthless germicide marketed as a cure for ailments from dandruff to cancer. Muckraking journalist Samuel Hopkins Adams exposed the industry in a 1905 Collier's Weekly series, and the resulting outcry led to the Food and Drugs Act of 1906. Wu argues that World War I then demonstrated attention capture's full power. Britain's Lord Kitchener launched the first systematic civilian propaganda campaign in 1914, and in the United States, George Creel ran the Committee on Public Information with 75,000 volunteer speakers and 75 million pamphlets. Journalist Walter Lippmann concluded that public consent had been "manufactured" (47-48), while Edward Bernays, Freud's nephew and a Creel Committee veteran, drew the opposite lesson: Propaganda's wartime success proved the potential of commercial persuasion.

The 1920s advertising industry professionalized around demand engineering, branding, and targeted campaigns. Listerine's "halitosis" campaign named a previously unremarkable condition and drove the company's earnings from $115,000 to over $8 million in seven years. J. Walter Thompson's Women's Editorial Department, led by Helen Lansdowne, developed campaigns aimed at female consumers that shifted from selling cures to selling the promise of a better life. The Lucky Strike campaign marketed cigarettes as health products until Federal Trade Commission scrutiny and consumer backlash intervened. The Depression devastated the industry, and a proposed law that would have outlawed most deceptive techniques was defeated by an industry alliance; a far weaker substitute passed in 1938.

Wu then turns to broadcasting's conquest of the home. The 1929 success of Amos 'n' Andy on NBC radio, sponsored by Pepsodent, established the template: Entertainment captured a massive audience whose attention was resold to advertisers. The show attracted an estimated 40 million nightly listeners, definitively making broadcasters into attention merchants. CBS president William Paley built his network into a dominant force by combining quality programming with a shrewd understanding that the business depended on delivering audiences to sponsors. Wu devotes a chapter to Nazi Germany's propaganda apparatus as the extreme case of total attention control, in which Joseph Goebbels's ministry combined entertainment with political content and mandatory listening sessions, deploying a low-cost radio and a volunteer monitoring network to ensure universal exposure. Wu connects this to human freedom, arguing that propaganda aims to make alternatives "seem unthinkable or nonexistent" (120).

The 1950s represent what Wu calls "peak attention." Television penetration rose from 9 percent of homes in 1950 to 72 percent by 1956, consuming nearly five hours daily. Elvis Presley's 1956 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show captured 82.6 percent of viewers. Advertising spending quadrupled over the decade. The quiz show scandals of 1958, revealing that popular programs had been rigged, devastated public trust. Wu frames the 1960s counterculture as an attentional revolt but argues it ultimately failed because most people never stopped watching television. The advertising industry adapted by co-opting the language of liberation: Coca-Cola's 1971 "I'd like to buy the world a Coke" commercial consummated the appropriation of countercultural ideals. Cable television fragmented audiences into demographic niches in the 1980s, while the remote control enabled channel surfing, a scattered form of viewing that served neither the viewer's satisfaction nor the advertiser's ideal.

Wu traces the emergence of the personal computer as a "third screen." Email, invented in 1971, introduced the addictive check-in habit that Wu compares to B. F. Skinner's concept of variable reinforcement. Video games demonstrated the computer's entertainment power. In the 1990s, America Online proved that social interaction was the surest lure for online audiences, growing to over 30 million subscribers through chat rooms and unlimited email. But AOL's transformation into an attention merchant, complete with a closed environment of sponsored content and sometimes fraudulent advertising deals, accelerated its decline as users migrated to the open Internet.

Celebrity culture, Wu argues, provided the attention merchants with their cheapest and most reliable content. People magazine, launched in 1974, became the most profitable magazine in the world. Oprah Winfrey built an empire fusing celebrity, spiritual authority, and commercial endorsement. Reality television, beginning with MTV's The Real World in 1992, industrialized the manufacture of fame from ordinary people at minimal cost. Mark Burnett's The Apprentice transformed Donald Trump from a struggling developer into a television personality, while the Kardashian family demonstrated that sustained reality fame could generate tens of millions in annual revenue.

Google rose to become the most profitable attention merchant in history by showing relevant ads only when users expressed commercial intent, a radical departure from the mass-bombardment approach. The early web's golden age of amateur blogging gave way to professional competition and clickbait, as sites like The Huffington Post pioneered sensationally headlined content and BuzzFeed refined the art of making stories go viral. Facebook, launched by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, inverted the usual model: Instead of offering content in exchange for attention, it gave users access to friends while users handed over personal data and created content enhancing Facebook's value. The smartphone became the ultimate frontier of attention harvesting, consuming nearly three hours of the average American's waking time by 2015. Instagram, launched in 2010 and acquired by Facebook for $1 billion, epitomized the democratization of celebrity through curated self-presentation.

By the mid-2010s, Wu describes a web degraded by invasive tracking, clickbait, and native advertising that blurred the line between editorial content and commercial promotion. Netflix's decision to forgo advertising and invest in immersive original programming like House of Cards tapped into a hunger for sustained attention, popularizing binge watching. Apple's 2015 decision to enable adblockers on iPhones represented both a corporate strike against Google and a response to public frustration. Wu analyzes Donald Trump's presidency as the attention merchant model applied to governance, identifying Trump as "the first attention merchant to take the presidency" (342), whose dominance of the contest for attention represented a form of power comparable to propaganda's.

In his epilogue, Wu calls for a "human reclamation project" involving individual practices like limiting screen time, support for technologies that aid focus, and scrutiny of what he calls "attention theft" in captive settings. He returns to William James's observation that our life experience equals what we have paid attention to, warning that "we are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine" (7).