The Attention Merchants

by Tim Wu

  In nearly every possible way, ad tech was terrible for consumers and, to compound the pity of it all, not particularly lucrative for advertisers either. As the programmer Marco Arment lamented in 2015, “In the last few years…web ad quality and tolerability have plummeted, and annoyance, abuse, misdirection, and tracking have skyrocketed. Publishers don’t have an easy job trying to stay in business today, but that simply doesn’t justify the rampant abuse, privacy invasion, sleaziness, and creepiness that many of them are forcing upon their readers.”9 Even the tech people managed to draw a short straw, for all of this mischief took a surprising amount of programming talent to accomplish. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” commented scientist Jeff Hammerbacher. “That sucks.”10

  —

  Ultimately, the problem was as old as the original proposition of seizing our attention and putting it to uses not our own. It is a scheme that has been revised and renewed with every new technology, which always gains admittance into our lives under the expectation it will improve them—and improve them it does until it acquires motivations of its own, which can only grow and grow. As Oxford ethicist James Williams put it,

  Your goals are things like “spend more time with the kids,” “learn to play the zither,” “lose twenty pounds by summer,” “finish my degree,” etc. Your time is scarce, and you know it. Your technologies, on the other hand, are trying to maximize goals like “Time on Site,” “Number of Video Views,” “Number of Pageviews,” and so on. Hence clickbait, hence auto-playing videos, hence avalanches of notifications. Your time is scarce, and your technologies know it.11

  In this game of trackers and profile builders, as in so many others, Google and Facebook, de facto diarchs of the online attention merchants, reigned supreme. By design, both firms had acquired the best data on just about every consumer on earth, as well as possessing the best tools for collecting more of it, which by the 2010s both were prepared to exploit as far as possible. Never mind that each had originally been hesitant even to allow advertising to pollute its pages or interfere with the user experience. That was then. Since those years of initial hand-wringing, as investors and Wall Street demanded their quarterly increases in revenue, there was little choice but to turn up the heat, intensifying the reach of ads while hoping that their respective market positions were secure enough to prevent too many users from bolting. The essential bind of the attention merchant began tightening even on those Faustian geniuses who thought they had beaten the Devil.

  YouTube, now a Google subsidiary, offers perhaps the starkest example of the change. Once entirely ad-free, by the mid-2010s many of its videos required users to watch a fifteen or thirty-second commercial to see a few minutes of content, making television’s terms look almost respectful by comparison. That priceless impression of getting great stuff for free, the attention merchant’s most essential magic trick, was losing its charm. As with any bit of legerdemain, once the actual workings are revealed, the strings made visible, it becomes ugly and obvious, drained of its power to enchant.

  Targeting and tracking were not the only innovations in web advertising over the 2010s. Trying to stay ahead of the growing disenchantment, sites like BuzzFeed brought forth their own inventions, if such ideas could merit the term. One was known as the “advertorial,” or “native advertising,” ads designed to look like content native to the site, aping its form and functionality. The idea was that if it didn’t look like an ad it might get past more users’ defenses. “We work with brands to help them speak the language of the web,” said Peretti in the 2010s of this Trojan horse approach, uncharacteristically compromising the integrity of his shameless love of contagion. “I think there’s an opportunity to create a golden age of advertising, like another Mad Men age of advertising, where people are really creative and take it seriously.”12

  In practice this supposedly new Mad Men age consisted of BuzzFeed-style stories written at the behest and expense of corporations. Consider “The 14 Coolest Hybrid Animals,” a series for Toyota’s Prius, or “11 Things You Didn’t Know About [the Sony] PlayStation” joined with “10 Awesome Downloadable Games You May Have Missed.” Since BuzzFeed also wrote “real” news stories about the Hybrid Sony PlayStation, it was sometimes awfully hard to distinguish the content that was sponsored, not that it mattered much in BuzzFeed’s case.

  “Maybe I’m old-fashioned but one core ethical rule I thought we had to follow in journalism was the church-state divide between editorial and advertising,” wrote Andrew Sullivan, the prominent blogger and former journalist, about this approach.13 Nonetheless, by mid-decade native advertising had become a commonplace and even heralded as a potential solution to journalism’s woes. It would be embraced by media companies as reputable as The New York Times and Condé Nast, which now, like BuzzFeed, had on-site units aping their own in-house style for their advertisers. “The ‘sponsored content’ model is designed,” Sullivan observed, “to obscure the old line as much as possible.”

  The world was slow to turn on the web, still after all the fountain of the new. Whether for reasons of politics or politesse, the web would suffer a lot of ruin before many critics, who’d fallen in love with its openness, would admit that things had gone awry. Even so, by the mid-2010s, more and more ordinary users had their own impression of the emperor’s new clothes. Perhaps the first sign of elite revolt was the idea best articulated by Nicholas Carr that the web was making us stupider. Maybe it was the growing talk of an “information glut,” or Jaron Lanier’s argument, in his manifesto You Are Not a Gadget, that the culture of the web had resulted in a suppression of individual creativity and innovation. Even the incredibly powerful tools of sharing and communication—email, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram—once employed by entities like BuzzFeed, didn’t seem so magical, having collaborated in building an attentional environment with so little to admire. For in its totality the web seemed to be bobbing in the crosscurrents of an aggressive egotism and neurasthenic passivity. Thus trapped, it was suddenly vulnerable to capture by anyone with a promise of something different or better.

  CHAPTER 27

  A RETREAT AND A REVOLT

  In 2011, the independent studio Media Rights Capital was shopping an American remake of a modestly successful British political drama named House of Cards. Among other advantages, the producers boasted of having attached to the show David Fincher, the Oscar-winning director of The Social Network. They hoped, ideally, to sell the idea to HBO, or maybe a cable channel like A&E interested in buttressing its reputation for serious drama since the success of Mad Men.

  Unexpectedly, while in Los Angeles, Fincher received a call from Ted Sarandos, a senior executive at Netflix. Netflix was, at the time, a company that had made its name shipping DVDs by mail; more recently it had begun streaming content over the Internet, with variable success. Sarandos was already known to Hollywood for buying its leftovers—the rights to old films that had already seen theatrical release, DVD sales and rentals, in-flight screening, and every other channel of distribution. Netflix was thus something of a town scrap dealer, at the bottom of the content food chain.

  “We want the series,” Sarandos told Fincher, “and I’m going to pitch you on why you should sell it to us.”1 Convincing a famous auteur to bring his talents to a medium—the Internet—then best known for cat videos was not going to be easy. But Netflix promised a lot. Though he’d never directed a TV series before, Fincher would be given enormous creative control. Rather than putting it through the pilot process, the usual way to test a TV show’s prospects, Netflix was willing to pay for two thirteen-episode seasons up front. Last but not least, Sarandos offered a pile of money: a reported $100 million, or as much as would be ordinarily invested in an expensive feature blockbuster.

  The risk for Netflix was that in exchange for its millions it would wind up stuck with a bomb that exploded in slow motion. At that moment, moreover, the company, while valued at hundreds of millions,
had just $17 million in profit to show for 2012. The risk for Fincher, of course, was that no one would watch the series or that Netflix would go bankrupt. But that $100 million was an offer he couldn’t refuse, and so House of Cards, arguably the first serious feature drama to debut on the Internet, began looking for its cast.

  This of course was no lark for Netflix. With the purchase of House of Cards, the rising firm was aiming to cause a definitive shake-up in both the television and Internet content markets. Consider that in 2011, all commercial Internet content was driven by advertising. Sure, there were different types: programmatic advertising, native advertising, Google AdWords, YouTube prerolls, Facebook ads, and Twitter’s sponsored tweets. But behind everything was the same old model: that of the attention merchant. Not since television in the 1950s had any medium become so quickly dominated by it.

  Netflix, then, was virtually alone, as an Internet company, in blazing a different path. From the beginning of its streaming venture, the firm had taken the bold and seemingly foolhardy decision to forgo advertising altogether. It rejected the attention merchant model, despite the obvious revenue potential. There was, perhaps, something natural to that decision, given that its DVD service was not ad-driven but by subscription. Still, the call was not inevitable. When asked to explain the company’s aversion to advertising, Reed Hastings, Netflix’s CEO, described it as part of a strategy of putting the viewer “in control of the experience.”2 Therefore, he said, “It’s fundamental to that control orientation that we don’t cram advertisements down people’s throats.”

  The intuition was, in retrospect, informed by a deeper insight than most anyone knew at the time. In business, there is always potential to gain something by zigging while everyone else is zagging. With everyone else—including its closest rival, Hulu, a joint venture of other media companies—reliant on advertising, Netflix could distinguish itself by offering a different kind of experience. But there was something more; in a sense, Netflix rediscovered a lost trove of human attention; not the splintered and fleeting kind being plundered by the web and cable TV, but deeper, sustained attention. It was a rich vein indeed, filled with an evident hunger for more engaging, immersive content. Netflix wasn’t the only one providing it, but it was the only Internet company.

  In 2013, when House of Cards premiered, Netflix made a splash by releasing all thirteen episodes of House of Cards at once. What it didn’t necessarily predict was the binging. The logical opposite of web or channel surfing, binging does not involve idly flipping through stuff, but engaging so deeply with a program that one can watch hours and hours in one sitting; the experience goes far beyond that of watching a feature-length film, instead competing with experiences like attending a performance of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. House of Cards was thirteen hours long, yet Netflix reported that thousands of viewers consumed it in one gulp over the weekend of its release.*

  A Netflix poll of TV streamers found that 61 percent defined their viewing style as binge watching, which meant two to six episodes at a sitting. Grant McCracken, a cultural anthropologist paid by Netflix to investigate (and promote) the habit, reported that “TV viewers are no longer zoning out as a way to forget about their day, they are tuning in, on their own schedule, to a different world. Getting immersed in multiple episodes or even multiple seasons of a show over a few weeks is a new kind of escapism that is especially welcomed today.”3 By that, he meant in the context of everything else having become crazy-making.

  Netflix’s success was a token of something unexpected despite having roots in the early 2000s. Television, the idiot box, the dreaded “unity machine,” the reviled “boob tube,” was declared by the smart money to be dead meat in the twenty-first century, destined perhaps to survive out of sheer inertia serving the poor and elderly shut-ins but eventually to go the way of the typewriter or horse and buggy. Always ahead of everyone in being wrong, the futurist George Gilder had published a book in 1990 entitled Life After Television. By 2007, even Damon Lindelof, co-creator of the hit series Lost, was boldly ready to wrongly proclaim that “television is dying.”4

  Many of the cable networks suffered from disenchantment caused by the slow surrender to pointless spectacle and inane personality. At the same time, however, the purveyors of high-quality, commercial-free programs—not only Netflix but HBO even earlier, as well as other networks like A&E and Showtime—began suddenly to prosper and attract audiences that approached the size of those attending prime time at its peak. HBO’s wildly popular show The Sopranos had more than 18 million viewers per episode over the early 2000s; a decade on, the network’s Game of Thrones would begin to reach 20 million per episode.

  Of course, certain segments of the population had never really left television at all. As faithful, regular, and predictable as the prime-time audiences of the 1950s were lovers of baseball, football, soccer, and other sports; in the United States and abroad, such broadcasts demonstrated an almost uncanny immunity to the laws governing other kinds of programming. Remember, Amos ’n’ Andy, with 40 million listeners in 1932, would lose its entire audience not long after. I Love Lucy, among the most successful sitcoms in history, petered out after six seasons. Yet no such fading away has been detected among sports viewers, who renew themselves in every generation. Perhaps it is because in sports there is no abuse of one’s attention, no jumping the shark. There may be long-term rises and declines in audiences, but overall, as ESPN’s John Skipper put it, they are “shockingly reliable.” In all other formats, however, attention and audiences were declining for free TV.

  The diminuendo had even forced the traditional advertising industry to up its game over the decade’s first century. In the long years of prime time’s uncontested sovereignty, and before the remote control, viewers could be expected to sit through commercials or, at worst, go off to get a snack of something they were being shown. The remote had done some damage to that fixity, but now a veritable revolution was relocating real control and choice in the hand of the viewer—at first through DVRs and the effectively unbounded selection of digital channels, and then streaming. Faced with unprecedented competition, advertising, as in the 1980s, was forced to become more intrinsically entertaining in order to have any chance of being effective. Once again, a thousand and one experts trumpeted the necessity of creating ads that viewers actually wanted to watch.

  But with so many ways of not watching advertisements, it was not enough to suppress increasing doubts as to whether anyone was actually watching the commercials. The industry also started returning to older strategies. Product placements became more common; late-night comedians incorporated products into their monologues. A show like Portlandia, a satire about earnest Oregonians, would begin incorporating Subarus into its skits, pursuant to a sponsorship contract. Shows also began to incorporate “live commercials,” in which characters suddenly stop what they are doing and begin finding reason to speak on the merits of a product. It still wouldn’t be enough to deter the hard-core ad-avoiders, but it cannot be denied that advertising, from the early 2000s onward, was trying much harder to be unavoidable and also likable.

  But by far the most important innovation was the immersive, commercial-free television to which addled audiences bombarded from all sides were now flocking. A few clever producers like Tom Fontana, creator of HBO’s Oz, and later David Chase, who conceived The Sopranos, were not only themselves attracted to the idea of making more filmic television, with psychological texture, but intuited that some viewers would be looking for a fully formed alternative reality they might enter for a time, a natural response when the built attentional environment becomes inhospitably chaotic. Indeed, what we witness in the disenchanted TV viewer is a return of something older—the deep, high-quality attention of motion picture viewers, those engrossed in a good book, or early television audiences, completely lost in the presentation. This is and always was the durable advantage of film and television, before the former was carved up by chase scenes and the latter by commercial breaks.
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  To pay this kind of attention can be rewarding. Here is the journalist Andrew Romano on his favorite viewing fare:

  After watching Game of Thrones for a mere 30 seconds, my brain begins to produce the alpha waves typically associated with hazy, receptive states of consciousness, which are also generated during the “light hypnotic” stage of suggestion therapy. At the same time, my neurological activity switches from the left hemisphere to the right—that is, from the seat of logical thought to the seat of emotion. Whenever this shift takes place, my body is flooded with the natural opiates known as endorphins, which explains why viewers have repeatedly told scientists that they feel relaxed as soon as they switch on the television, and also why this same sense of relaxation tends to dissolve immediately after the set is turned off.5

  If that sounds like an experience worth more than all the mindless diversions of free TV, it probably is. Buffeted by websites designed to distract, who-wants-to-be-a-celebrity, and the rest, streamed television—the convergence Microsoft could not quite foresee—was suddenly and unexpectedly emerging as a haven in the digital pandemonium. Television—which once had shown such promise to improve the human condition, but which had been kidnapped by commercial interests virtually at birth and raised to be the greatest attention harvester of the twentieth century and still the attention merchant’s favorite servant—was now repaying the attention it attracts in a way that put the viewer’s experience first.

  To make things not for grazing but for deep engagement required a new set of narrative strategies, though it was possible to make such television at various levels of quality and sophistication, depending on what the viewer sought. So it had been, too, with the new idiom’s progenitors, feature film and even the Victorian novel. While House of Cards might have made binging mainstream, in the decade before, writers of shows were inventing what Vince Gilligan (of Breaking Bad) termed the “hyperserial.” Unlike the dramatic series of old, this kind made sense only to those who committed to every episode and indeed multiple seasons of viewing.