The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

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.

• The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
• The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age
• People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy
• The Elements of Journalism, Revised and Updated 3rd Edition: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect
• Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits
• Digital Disconnect
• Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America
• Black Ops Advertising: Native Ads, Content Marketing and the Covert World of the Digital Sell
• Best Practice Cases in Branding for Strategic Brand Management, 3/e
• The Happiness Effect: How Social Media is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost