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.
