The Attention Merchants

by Tim Wu

  Since An American Family, it had been a consistent and predictable consequence of reality television that cast members became famous, if only fleetingly. It was not star power of the sort one could pack up and sell elsewhere; it was the sort of celebrity Charles Van Doren had enjoyed before he was disgraced. But it was enough to pull viewers in and also to compensate the players. Indeed, as we’ve said, performers in these low-budget affairs were largely paid in attention. That carried the hope of a more lasting celebrity and the opportunities that come with it. It certainly felt like actual celebrity while it lasted. As Kevin Powell, an original Real World cast member, described attending the Video Music Awards in 1992, “You’re talking Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana, Howard Stern—and then the cast of The Real World. And I swear, bro, the fans screamed for us as if we were the Beatles. That’s when I really knew the show was a game-changer.”20

  In this effect, too, An American Family was the prototype. “This series,” Lance Loud later said, “was the fulfillment of the middle-class dream that you can become famous for being just who you are.”21 It wasn’t Gilbert’s intent, but the unexpected effect was to make the Louds famous for a brief time. Pat Loud would publish her autobiography, and the five children would perform as a rock band on The Dick Cavett Show, à la the Partridge Family. Bill Loud would pose in his bathrobe for Esquire, and Lance in his birthday suit for Screw magazine. And yet by the 1980s, the Louds’ name would scarcely ring a bell; the exception was Lance, who would achieve immortality as a gay icon.

  In a limited way, “ordinary Joe” species of celebrity had existed before—game show champions of the 1950s being the clearest antecedent. But the emergence of an entire program genre “celebrifying” ordinary people, and soon to dominate television, was something new. As such, it marked the beginning of a subtle but significant change in the very nature of celebrity. If once it comprised heroes, demigods, kings, and saints, and then later icons of the screen or sports, by the 1990s celebrity was becoming something that could happen to anyone. Thus it became a worthwhile, reasonable goal for the great generality. This, ultimately, may account for the genre’s lasting appeal.

  The reality format took a category that had always existed, the god-like among us, and democratizing it, brought the realm of the formerly unreachable ever closer. It had always been a paradox that celebrities were the Other, beyond us, yet at the same time like us (perhaps this was modernity’s version of the ancient duality of God transcendent and God immanent). The paradox, we might say, resulted from their celebrity having been constructed by our collective attention, producing an incomprehensibility that managed to be comprehensible. But the attention that celebrities had previously captured had some more or less objective basis in their attainment, appearance, wealth, or talent. Reality television inverted the process, industrializing the manufacture of celebrity for the pure sake of attention capture. Having devised a way to harvest attention by presenting the ordinary, it fairly revolutionized the attention merchant’s business model. For the attention gathered this way could, like any other, be sold to advertisers; but it also served to compensate talent.*2 With so many new celebrities minted every year, the attention economy would come close to validating the suggestion, sometimes credited to Andy Warhol, that television was building a system to ensure that everyone would be famous, or have a chance to be. This would sustain the system, rather in the way that everyone in post-industrialized nations is given to believe they have some chance of being rich.

  For ordinary people, reality TV came to seem almost like a lottery. The winning ticket of stardom might remain a statistical rarity, but the chances hadn’t seemed so good since the days when a girl might frequent the soda counter at Schwab’s hoping to be “discovered.” The difference was that, unlike traditionally constituted celebrities—a president, an actor, or a musician—once the show was over, the star had no means to sustain the attention that had become a way of life. Acting fast, some might convert their fame into a new, usually less glamorous gig. Most would suffer the usual vicissitudes of the entertainment industry, in which breaking out is against the odds. Eventually, they would go back to normal life, the subject of an occasional Internet joke.

  Consider the tail-off of one of the more successful early stars, Eric Nies, the male model from The Real World; he was the show’s biggest star, thanks to his good looks and penchant for taking off his shirt to reveal a finely muscled torso. Nies did enjoy some success after the program’s run: he became co-host of another MTV show, The Grind, dancing on its stage for a few years. After being replaced in 1995, he produced a series of dance exercise videos, in which he slowly disrobed while the other dancers stayed dressed. He next showed up in an infomercial for the “Abaratus,” a long elastic band used for abdominal exercises. And that is where his public career would have ended, but for one final appearance on a short-lived reality show entitled Confessions of a Teen Idol.

  Whatever the consequences for the individuals exposed, reality television was like manna from heaven for the attention merchants. It came down to simple economics, or as one television executive observed: “A reality show can grab a primetime audience just as effectively as a good drama or comedy, but sometimes at half the price.”22 For this reason, and with little remark, over the early 2000s the business of television was fundamentally reset, as the reality model, by almost any measure, became the dominant form of programming, capturing by the 2002–2003 season 63.1 percent of prime time, or 124 million or so regular viewers. It would remain at that level for the better part of the decade.23

  The key demographic for reality television had always been young viewers. Perhaps this was because of the genre’s origins on MTV, or simply youth’s relative willingness to believe in their own chance of achieving fame in their lifetime (outside of the political class, the middle-aged are under fewer such delusions). Nevertheless, over time, programmers found that the reality moss could overgrow other demographics, too: there would be offerings for middle-aged men, like The Deadliest Catch (a show featuring fishermen); ones for women with children, like Wife Swap, focused on keeping house; and for unreconstructed materialists of all ages, Real Housewives, an unscripted soap set in the McMansions of the affluent but never satisfied. Indeed, over the next decade, there would be almost three hundred new reality shows trying almost every conceivable permutation of attention capture tricks, including talent shows (American Idol), launching your successful start-up (Shark Tank); pathology voyeurism, formerly known as freak shows (Hoarders); variations on a theme of The Real World (Jersey Shore, group living featuring the Italian American “Guido” subculture), celebrity family life (The Osbournes, showing the ordinary domesticity of former Black Sabbath front man Ozzy Osbourne); women marrying for money, men for trophy (Million Dollar Matchmaker); making it yourself—a better life through real estate (The Million Dollar Listing). And then there were the truly bizarre experiments, for instance, a match-making game show on which the contestant chooses a husband from among twenty men wearing masks—the kicker: it’s called Mr. Personality and hosted by the former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The shows were so cheap to produce, no idea was deemed too ridiculous to try.

  Perhaps the greatest of all, at least with respect to encapsulating the quintessence of the genre and the alteration it effected in the attention industries, would be Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Kim Kardashian was the friend, and then frenemy, of former reality star heiress Paris Hilton, later to become a successful DJ. Kardashian was an heiress of a different kind. Daughter of the late Robert Kardashian, O. J. Simpson defense attorney, she lived with her two sisters (Khloé and Kourtney) and their disaffected brother Rob. Her mother, Kris, had married Olympic legend Bruce Jenner (now named Caitlyn), and so Kim’s household also included half-siblings Kylie and Kendall. Kim, once a stylist for Lindsay Lohan and others, always had a flare for the dramatic, having at a tender age married and divorced, the latter not accomplished before producing an infamous sex tape with her then
lover, which somehow leaked, as Paris’s had too, after all. Mother Kris, always looking out for her brood, thought they would be naturals as the subject of a television show. This fact came to the attention of Ryan Seacrest, producer and host of American Idol, who, joining with the venerable team of Bunim and Murray, launched KUWTK, as it is known, in 2007. The rest, as they say, is history.

  It is a requirement for successful reality television that it be critically panned. The New York Times called the new show a “a window into a family…that seems to understand itself only in terms of its collective opportunism” and commented that “the Kardashian show is not about an eccentric family living conventionally; it is purely about some desperate women climbing to the margins of fame, and that feels a lot creepier.”24 PopMatters opined that “there is something disturbing about the Kardashians’ intense hunger for fame. But even worse—it is downright boring to watch this family live out their tedious lives.”25 Yet what the Kardashians must be given credit for is breaking the curse of ephemeral reality fame; for close to a decade they have sustained a multimillion-dollar empire. The family demonstrated a reality TV version of synergy—should audiences grow tired of the tedious antics of one family member, another quickly jumped in to provide a new hot mess, like lipstick-wearing tag-team wrestlers. Meanwhile, over the 2010s the Kardashians’ earnings increased at a pace to make a banker jealous. The family made $65 million collectively in 2010, while Kim’s individual earnings had reached $28 million by 2014 and $52.5 million by 2015.

  With the show as primary attention platform, virtually every known subsidiary revenue stream has been tapped or developed by them. There have been product endorsements; paid appearances, tweets, and sponsored birthday parties; eponymous apparel lines, fragrances, books (like Selfish, composed entirely of selfies), show spinoffs; and an impressively lucrative and popular iPhone game—all of it kept aloft by KUWTK, whose dramatic potential never seems to wane, no matter how many sister-on-sister or mother-daughter catfights, no matter how many romances, divorces, pregnancies, unmentioned facial alterations, or rides on private jets the audience is shown. Professor Elizabeth Currid-Halkett writes: “It’s clear that the Kardashians have turned generating publicity, and possibly profit from that attention, into an artform.”26

  The urge for what’s next seems to be insatiable, and for that reason the Kardashians and the world of television in all likelihood have cause to worry. It is simply not conceivable that the future of commercial television, whatever it may turn out to be, can indefinitely sustain attention for any particular format, particularly one with as much market share and overdevelopment as reality TV. No matter how desirable the financial calculus, no attention capture strategy has been able to stay ahead of the disenchantment effect indefinitely. Eventually, even the goose that lays the golden egg gets old and dies. Tom Freston knew this and with a bit of foresight saved his network from irrelevancy.

  Nevertheless, reality had been a momentous discovery, even if something of a misnomer. For what viewers were flocking to was both real and not real, a distortion for the sake of spectacle, calibrated to harvest the most attention at the lowest price possible. It was, however, real enough to be believed—not literally perhaps, but in the way scripted drama is believed—and, by the new millennium, to have a whole nation of viewers content, in effect, to watch versions of themselves with vicarious delight. Thus would television enter the new millennium, perilously dependent on someone else’s idea of real life yet still the reigning champion of the twentieth century’s breathless contest for attention.

  * * *

  *1 An antitrust challenge to this arrangement brought by the start-up Discovery Music Network floundered and was settled for a nominal fee.

  *2 At least initially. When a reality show becomes a huge hit, its performers bargain for pay raises like any other talent. But most attention merchants don’t mind drifting back toward the older model if by then the ad revenues are strong enough.

  PART V

  WON’T BE FOOLED AGAIN

  It was promoted as “the most elaborate, complex and ambitious television program produced.” On December 31, 1999, the new millennium was welcomed by a grand coalition of the world’s television broadcasters, who put together a twenty-three-hour-long live program to cover New Year’s as it occurred around the globe. Correspondents reported live from festivities at each meridian, and in the United States, the ageless Dick Clark, a fixture of television since the 1950s, hosted a countdown program featuring an all-star musical lineup that included the Bee Gees, Christina Aguilera, Barry Manilow, NSYNC, and Aerosmith.

  The networks would claim audiences of more than 800 million worldwide, but who could blame one for thinking it television’s last hurrah? For in that epochal year, there was no denying that mass attention seemed to have migrated irresistibly to a new medium that had lately evolved into a form we would now recognize and yet was plainly still only in the infancy of its possibilities. The BBC had declared 1999 “the year of the Net,” and CNN.com invited users to “uncork the bubbly, boot up the computer, and usher in the new era in an appropriately futuristic way.”1 A site named the EarthCam offered “the Webcast of the century,” with cameras sending pictures from New Year’s celebrations around the world, just as broadcast was doing with such expensive fanfare.2 CNN.com further allowed that “by staying home this New Year’s Eve with your computer, you really aren’t missing a thing.”

  By 2000, the consensus was that the “old media”—the industries that had captured the preponderance of human attention over the last century—were basically doomed. They could try as they might to delay the future, but ultimately the new would replace the old as it always had. The legacy attention merchants and their collaborators in advertising were, by this understanding, on a path to extinction. “It’s our country. It’s our media now. It’s our time and attention,” wrote Jeff Jarvis, prominent booster of the new media. “Sorry if we, the people, disappoint you. But does it occur to you that you disappointed us?”3

  Television, for its part, seemed to confirm its own desperation as it churned out increasingly bizarre reality shows (like The Swan, centered on extreme plastic surgery), refitted game shows, like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, a retread of The $64,000 Question, and ever stranger hybrids of celebrity and reality, like Vanilla Ice Goes Amish.4 Whether it was the passive, suppliant state it induced in audiences, the abhorrent executives who plotted it, or the shameless catering to the lowest common denominator, this unprecedented destitution of the second screen, the previous century’s mightiest attention harvester, had those not yet ready to despair asking when something better would appear.

  That’s what made the 2000s different. Perhaps it was a kind of millenarianism, but there was a widespread expectation of a great transformation, a belief in the liberating influence of something new and fundamentally different. In 2001, Lawrence Lessig published The Future of Ideas, prophesying that the web would serve as a new commons, liberating the ordinary individual from the “electronic bondage” of television, and recasting him as a contributor and creator.5 The 2000s would create a different kind of citizen: a nation of creators, as interested in one another as they had been in the mass-marketed offerings of the dominant attention merchants. But how this might work in practice remained vague, and even mysterious, in a manner befitting any prophecy. It would take a decade to see what it all meant.

  CHAPTER 20

  THE KINGDOM OF CONTENT: THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT

  In 1996, Microsoft was at the height of its powers, the technology sector’s most intimidating behemoth, brutally efficient and plainly bent on the conquest of all that surrounded it. Its billions in profits based on sales of its ubiquitous, if unloved, Windows and Office, the graphical operating system of most computers on earth, had made it the most valuable company in the world. If anyone had made a fortune by cornering the market for nuts and bolts and sticking to it, it was Microsoft.1 It was a surprise, therefore, when on January 3, 1996, its ch
ief executive, Bill Gates, wearing his large, dark-framed glasses that were not yet a hipster affectation but still the sign of the true nerd, posted an essay on Microsoft’s website, with a counterintuitive title: “Content Is King.”2

  At the time of that coronation, Internet “content” consisted mainly of homemade web pages with flashing words and the text forums where geeks discussed the pluses and minuses of object-oriented programming languages. Nevertheless, Gates prophesied an explosion of new creativity that would dominate the Internet’s future. “Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting,” he wrote, adding, “The television revolution that began half a century ago spawned a number of industries…but the long-term winners were those who used the medium to deliver information and entertainment.” But his prediction also came with a warning that to succeed, Internet content would have to be good:

  If people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a screen, they must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information that they can explore at will. They need to have audio, and possibly video. They need an opportunity for personal involvement that goes far beyond that offered through the letters-to-the-editor pages of print magazines.3

  And so, at the command of its great leader, the world’s most profitable company would spring to action, beginning a massive, multibillion-dollar effort to seize the emerging market being created by “convergence,” a world called “Internet-television.” A new breed of attention merchant was being born, and Microsoft planned to rule them all. Unfortunately, as Gates had warned, anyone who would rule the Internet had better make his content good. For Microsoft, that turned out to be the sticking point.