Attention Merchants

What it is

Wu puts the birth of the industry at 1833, with Benjamin Day's New York Sun, a penny paper priced below its own production cost. Day could only survive selling papers that cheaply because he was not really selling papers. He was selling his readers to advertisers. Wu's line is that readers may have thought themselves his customers but were in fact his product.

The structure has been stable ever since. Something is given away at or below cost, an audience assembles around it, and the audience is sold on to a third party who wants to reach it. What changes across the two centuries is only the medium and the territory.

The underlying observation is older than Wu's label. Dallas Smythe made the same argument in the 1970s under the heading of the audience commodity, and the precursor is worth carrying. What Wu supplies is the name and the history.

In effect

Wu's book opens on the modern descendant of the 1833 move: Education Funding Partners pitching the Twin Rivers school district for advertising access to its students. Same trade, relocated to a classroom.

Used as a tool, the category asks one question of any free service: if this is not being paid for by the person using it, who is paying, and what are they buying. The answer is usually attention, and the interesting part is what the seller had to do to the product to harvest more of it.

What it does not say

It does not say that advertising-funded media is by itself a harm. The category is descriptive. It names a business model and dates it, and the arguments about consequences are separate arguments that have to be made on their own evidence.

It does not rest on research. This is a historical and business-model category, not a testable effect, and replication does not apply to it.

It does not make Wu's reporting independent fact. The page references and the Twin Rivers figure are his reporting and were not traced to a primary document here. Cite them as his.

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