The Attention Merchants

Wu traces the history of how human attention became a commodity — from Benjamin Day's New York Sun in 1833, which invented the penny press model of selling eyeballs to advertisers, through radio, television, and the rise of social media platforms that perfected the extraction. The book's central thesis is that every attention merchant follows the same cycle: capture attention with free or cheap content, harvest it for revenue, push until the audience rebels, then find a new frontier. Wu identifies this pattern repeating with remarkable consistency across two centuries and very different technologies. The book is the direct successor to his earlier The Master Switch and shares its ability to illuminate the present through long historical arcs. For product people, it reframes engagement metrics not as neutral measures of value but as instruments in an industry with a specific and not always admirable lineage. Understanding the history of the business model you depend on is a prerequisite for using it responsibly.