The Ultimate Price for Ad-Powered Free Content is Us
In brief:
- Author Tim Wu talks about how human attention is resold to advertisers for commercial interests
- A history of American media and advertising
- Traces the rise of penny press, radio, television, computers and new advertising platforms like Facebook and Google and the concept of ad-powered free content
- Takeaway — Wu suggests we judiciously self-regulate the time we spend online
We read newspapers. We listen to radio broadcasts. We are glued to our television screens. We surf the internet on our computers and smartphones. We check emails. We check Facebook, Twitter and a whole bunch of social networking services that come with the promise of connecting us to family, friends and strangers alike. We take selfies and post them on Instagram and Snapchat.
Ever wondered what connects all these different dots? Attention. “In the main currents of psychological research, attention is treated as a resource — a person has only so much of it,” wrote Matthew B. Crawford in the book The World Beyond Your Head. Author Tim Wu takes this aspect a step further with The Attention Merchants, where he argues that all the aforementioned attention seeking habits are mere cogwheels of an advertising-driven media machine that resells our attention to advertisers, often at an enormous profit.
An Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher professor of law at Columbia Law School, Wu’s The Attention Merchants is a history of American media as much as it’s a history of advertising, tracing its origins back in the 19th century to the present phenomenon of ad-blocking software on websites. “It was a challenging book to write,” says Wu via a phone interview. “I was interested in telling a story about human attention. It’s geographically American centric only because it is impossible to include everything, but I have tried to cover developments in other countries as they happened.”
The book begins in 1833 during the newspaper wars in New York, crediting Benjamin Day as the first ever merchant of attention. Day, who founded The Sun, sold the daily for just a penny when its rivals like The Morning Courier and New York Enquirer were selling it for six cents. The Sun compensated for this loss by earning revenues from advertisements, and within two years of its founding, became the most widely read newspaper in the world. Day had effectively traded readers’ attention into a profit-making machinery.
As the twentieth century rolled, advertisements became the chief means to sell a product, spurious or otherwise. Case in example — Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment, which was marketed as a cure-all for all diseases known to man.
That the power of persuasive advertising was so strong was not lost on the U.K. and U.S. governments during World War I, who used it to further their war propaganda. Decades later Adolf Hitler would follow the same footsteps to establish a totalitarian state and whip up a wave of anti-Semitic frenzy, ultimately leading to the Second World War.
If these events were major advertising milestones, there were setbacks too. Painstaking investigative efforts by enterprising New York Sun crime reporter Samuel Hopkins Adams and the subsequent passage of Pure Food and Drug Act led to an examination of Stanley’s concoction, which found it to contain mostly mineral oil and none of the medical benefits purportedly advertised.
Wu further states that such periodic resistance movements against advertising, dubbed attentional revolts, either in the form of regulation (tougher laws against fraudulent ads) or indifference (during the rise of hippie movement in the late 1960’s), only made the advertising industry adopt more sophisticated techniques to capitalize on human attention.
But the revolts continue to this day in various forms. When television channels introduced commercial breaks in between programs in the 1950s, Zenith introduced the remote control as a way to flip channels. When ads on the web became too intrusive and pernicious, then came the spam filters and ad-blocking software.
What’s even more interesting is how every technological advancement in the world of media triggered a new advertising spree. As radio and television sets began to encroach the “sacred” family space, advertisers found innovative ways to monetize audiences’ attention for their commercial interests.
Wu goes on to cite the case of the radio show Amos ’n’ Andy, which first aired on a Chicago station in 1928. At its peak, the show had 40 to 50 million nightly listeners, out of a national population of only 122 million, “the equivalent of having today’s Super Bowl audiences each and every evening — and with just one advertiser” — Pepsodent toothpaste. The show singlehandedly pulled the company out of its teething troubles, “at least for while.”
Same is the case with television. When “prime time” shows like NBC’s Texaco Star Theater began to draw more and more audiences, television channels, which were airing shows sustained by a single sponsor, came with the idea of repeated commercial breaks during designated slots to sell shows to more than one advertiser and make more money.
But nothing would be as momentous as the arrival of the computer and the internet. By then most Americans were used to being coaxed via billboards, newspaper, radio and television ads. But computers, acting as the gateway to the Internet in the early 1990’s, would bite into whatever attention was left, causing internet service providers like America Online (AOL) to lower their subscription fees in favor of displaying ads on the web.
Google originally was not a fan of what was a commercial exploitation of the web. Started as a research project out of Stanford University in 1996, the online search engine service became quickly popular, leading the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to devise new ways to make money. And they would succumb to the temptation of selling paid advertisements on search results page through a bidding process where search keywords would be auctioned to advertisers. Called AdWords, it still continues to be the biggest revenue earner for the company.
Facebook too has a similar story. Founder Mark Zuckerberg famously rejected a $1 million deal from Sprite to turn its blue website green for a day in 2006, but he would eventually go the advertising way to keep the social network running. With users voluntarily furnishing all of their personal information, the vast amount of data amassed by the company would help it run very successful targeted advertising campaigns based on the their location, demography and interests.
Google and Facebook, Wu writes, are the “de facto diarchs of the online attention merchants,” tracking every single move of its users online to serve their needs. In contrast, he also highlights Wikipedia, which when faced with the same predicament, decided to take the non-profit approach to fund its business, and video streaming service Netflix, which charges a monthly $9.99 (for a Standard plan) for no ads.
For companies like Facebook and Google (and other Silicon Valley companies like Pinterest, Snapchat and Twitter), the basic rule of advertising is “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product.” Taken in this context, it’s worth pondering if we, as users, would like to pay for an ad-free Facebook or Google.
“People have always paid for convenience and better user experience,” says Emily Bell, who is the director of Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. “We have become much more used to paying for things than ever before, including news (The Wall Street Journal and The Times, for example, have most of their online content behind a paywall), but what people don’t want to pay for is stuff they don’t want. Ad blockers are popular because ads incur additional data charges on phones, where most people consume news today. I think people will tolerate terrible ads if there was no cost to the data.”
Wu is also dismissive of the emergence of viral news sites like Buzzfeed (in a chapter titled “The Web Hits Bottom”) and the latest trend of microfame, an online offshoot of reality television that turns everyone of us into miniature “attention merchants” on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram.
Bell however disagrees. “Tim Wu is writing from a quite privileged position as a public intellectual. He already has a profile and a body of work (Wu is also the author of The Master Switch and famously coined the term net-neutrality in 2003) and seeks attention in his own way. But the way he wrote dismissively about narcissistic attention is only a part of the story. Yes, people do post stuff that exaggerates what’s really going on in their lives in the same way we show our different facets to different people. Plus, the benefits of free speech are so much greater in today’s information society.”
It may be wishful to think of the web as a free open space anymore, but the unassailable truth is that attention-driven advertising model is the mainstay of most media organizations. Further compounding the problem is the rise of Facebook (Instant Articles), Google (Accelerated Mobile Pages, Play Newsstand) and Apple (Apple News) as news distribution platforms, and the problems of filter-bubbles and echo chambers they pose.
“There is a big question about how independent media sees itself in relation to technology companies,” says Bell. “What a company like Buzzfeed does is totally different from large legacy media like News Corp., who have been vocal and hostile about Google and Facebook’s intervention in the market. There is heightened sense of anxiety among independent media about what being dependent on third-party platforms really means. Most media organizations have ceded their distribution control to these platforms or their control has been taken away from them. That’s because they don’t have enough data scientists, software developers and other resources technology companies have from day one.”
But Bell says echo chambers, an idea that these new distribution platforms have isolated people from opposing viewpoints, aren’t a new phenomenon. The lack of media diversity in a previous age meant that people altogether avoided the perception of an echo chamber. “Wherever you have competing media, you always have echo chambers. You always have people who congregate to one view over the other. It’s just all of this is much more visible today on Facebook and Twitter,” says Bell.
What Wu ultimately appears to be clearly concerned about is our lack of attention to this aspect of entrenched commercialization in our lives. “Advertising is all about manipulation,” says Wu. “I want people to carefully consider the time they spend online. This book is not intended to bring about a regulatory overhaul. It’s about people becoming conscious of how they are allowing theirs brains to be accessed.”
Wu doesn’t go as far as to suggest regulatory prescriptions to resolve the issue. Rather he proposes self-regulation, imploring us to go off the digital grid (also known as technocamping) to tune ourselves out from time to time. “If we desire a future that avoids the enslavement of the propaganda state as well as the narcosis of the consumer and celebrity culture, we must first acknowledge the preciousness of our attention and resolve not to part with it as cheaply or unthinkingly as we so often have.”
As Jennifer Senior wrote in her review of the book for The New York Times, “We are what we choose to focus on, the sum of our concentrations. What will we choose? This is an age of glorious individualism. Yet never, it seems, have we belonged less to ourselves.”
Timeline of Major Events in Advertising History -
References / Sources -
- Author Tim Wu, Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Columbia Law School, twu@law.columbia.edu
- Emily Bell, Director, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia Journalism School, eb2740@columbia.edu
- Book jacket cover image, Goodreads http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28503628-the-attention-merchants
- Tim Wu’s photo http://www.timwu.org/about.html
- Emily Bell’s Photo, Tow Center http://towcenter.org/about/who-we-are/
- More about net neutrality, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality
- Netflix subscription plan comparison chart, Netflix https://www.netflix.com/getstarted?locale=en-IN
- “Review: ‘The Attention Merchants’ Dissects the Battle for Clicks and Eyeballs”, Jennifer Senior, The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/03/books/review-attention-merchants-tim-wu.html
