The Attention Merchants

In The Attention Merchants, Tim Wu traces the history of the industries built on capturing and reselling human attention, arguing that the modern “attention economy” is not a digital-age invention but a cycle repeated since the nineteenth century. Wu, a Columbia law professor and author of The Master Switch, frames the book around a recurring bargain: media offer free or cheap content, and in exchange they harvest attention to sell to advertisers. He opens with Benjamin Day’s New York Sun in the 1830s, which used sensational crime coverage and penny pricing to build mass circulation, then moves through poster advertising, patent-medicine pitches, and the rise of mail-order catalogs. A central figure is Claude Hopkins, the adman who pioneered scientific advertising and consumer habit formation for products like Pepsodent and Schlitz beer. Wu also examines wartime propaganda, including George Creel’s Committee on Public Information, and later the birth of commercial radio, television, and the soap opera, showing how each new medium industrialized attention capture. The book’s distinctive framework is a cyclical “attention harvest” followed by public backlash, which Wu calls the “attention rebellion”—moments when users resist, as with remote controls, ad-skipping VCRs, and subscription models. He extends the story to the internet era: email spam, banner ads, clickbait, and the rise of Facebook, Google, and algorithmic feeds optimized for engagement. Wu argues that persuasion has grown more precise and personalized, making resistance harder, and he questions whether attention should be treated as a commons rather than a commodity. The narrative is chronological and journalistic, blending business history, profiles, and media criticism rather than offering prescriptive advice. It concludes by asking whether a new attention rebellion is possible.