One of the Best Books of the Year The San Francisco Chronicle * The Philadelphia Inquirer * Vox
* The Globe and Mail (Toronto) From Tim Wu author of the award-winning The Master Switch ( a
New Yorker and Fortune Book of the Year) and who coined the term net neutrality-a revelatory
ambitious and urgent account of how the capture and re-sale of human attention became the
defining industry of our time. Ours is often called an information economy but at a moment
when access to information is virtually unlimited our attention has become the ultimate
commodity. In nearly every moment of our waking lives we face a barrage of efforts to harvest
our attention. This condition is not simply the byproduct of recent technological innovations
but the result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on
human attention. Wu's narrative begins in the nineteenth century when Benjamin Day discovered
he could get rich selling newspapers for a penny. Since then every new medium-from radio to
television to Internet companies such as Google and Facebook-has attained commercial viability
and immense riches by turning itself into an advertising platform. Since the early days the
basic business model of attention merchants has never changed: free diversion in exchange for a
moment of your time sold in turn to the highest-bidding advertiser. Full of lively unexpected
storytelling and piercing insight The Attention Merchants lays bare the true nature of a
ubiquitous reality we can no longer afford to accept at face value.
