Advertising Hazards: Your Attention is a Commodity That Can Be Manipulated | Tim Wu

“My Experience is What I Agree to Pay Attention to,” said psychologist William James. And therein lies the problem and danger of advertising: we don’t always agree or choose to pay attention, but it shapes our life experience irrevocably. Wu's latest book is "The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads" ().
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Transcript - So there was a man named Benjamin Day who I call the first of the attention merchants, the founder of the New York Sun, who was in his own way a business genius and an innovator. He had this idea which was as opposed to selling a newspaper for six cents which was the normal way of doing it, he would sell his newspaper for a penny and try and attract an enormous audience and resell that audience to advertisers. So the newspapers at the time, the six penny papers, they’re a little bit boring. They covered politics and finance. They didn’t have crime stories, that kind of thing. And he introduced a sort of a far more interesting newspaper. The very first issue was all about the suicide of a man who had been separated from his lover. It had stories of death, mayhem, destruction, gossip and was sold at such a low price that he managed to attract these enormous audiences which then were resold to advertisers. Now the thing about that penny price is it was a money losing proposition unless you sold enough and unless you reach enough advertisers to make it worth it. So he pioneered this unusual business model which today is found in as many places as Google, Facebook, Instagram, you know, it’s sort of taken over our lives. Read Full Transcript Here: .