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

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 reached 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.

So we are in a period where there’s something of a revolt going on against advertising. There are a lot of people who consider themselves immune to ads or try and avoid all advertising. There’s cord cutters and there’s a lot of people who use ad blocking technologies to try and have themselves sort of in an ad-free zone. And it’s reached the point where it’s a little bit of a kind of a war, maybe a war of attrition.

And I’ll say two things about that. First, in the history of advertising, there have been similar moments. It seems that about every 30 years or so there’s a kind of revolt, usually because things have gone too far in one way or another, and I think in some ways things have gone too far on the web. That there is just too much, too intrusive, too much privacy invasion and people are starting to say, you know, this is not what I bargained for. Whatever deal we had, I think you’re exceeding the terms.

I think that hopefully it will lead to a place where we strike some kind of new deal, some kind of understanding is made. You know, the web lacks any kind of limits as to where advertising should or shouldn’t go. It’s not like newspapers or something where there’s, you know, you don’t have every page of the newspaper completely covered in ads. There’s kind of a bargain. And I hope we reach that on the web.

Another thing that it will probably lead to, however, is also more and more efforts to use advertising that is surreptitious, that gets under the radar, that you don’t really realize is advertising. You might even call it manipulation or nudges. I think you’ll see this particularly with some of our devices or new technologies.

Let’s say you use Google Maps trying to find something, a place to eat. How much of that decision is based on what’s nearby and the best, and how much is based on who is paid at Google to sort of put the ad there? I think as we move into an era where we increasingly rely on intelligent intermediaries defining things for us or to be our guides in life, the possibilities of surreptitious marketing increase.

And I think that’s a direction that we’ll probably see, particularly with so much resistance to advertising. You know, I think as a culture we’ve become obsessed with free stuff, almost frankly quite to our detriment. You know, it’s almost impossible for many people to consider using anything on the web that isn’t free. Somehow it’s like an outrage if you have to pay for it. And there’s been a cost to that.

I think that when many people signed up for Facebook in the early days, it just seemed fun and free. There was very few advertising or very little advertising. But slowly we’ve come to understand that you’re paying in very different ways. You’re paying with your data which you hand over. You’re paying with your attention. If yo...