AOL pivoted from ad-free service to monetizing its user base as an attention merchant

Evidence

Most important for the board, Pittman brought with him the business mind-set of the New York media industries. At the time, in its search for revenue alternatives, AOL thought it could perhaps sell books, or offer its own brand of telephone services.*5 But on first look Pittman noticed that AOL had millions of customers staring at screens, and instantly concluded that its financial future was as an attention merchant. No matter that AOL had distinguished itself in the early 1990s as “ad-free” (in contrast to Prodigy). After years of building the AOL brand and attracting millions of customers, it was now time to “leverage the asset,” or, in Pittman’s alternative terminology, time to “harvest.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 727

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader arc of this book: platforms building audiences first, then harvesting them, the same pattern Wu traces with earlier media like radio and broadcast TV. — connects to: Business models now give goods away free in exchange for user attention.; Free digital services are paid for by users’ attention.; Platform profits come from harvesting user attention and selling it back to advertisers — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 43 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• YouTube’s shift to pre-roll ads revealed the free-lunch trick of attention merchants #exemplifies (0.80) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1087
• Ad-supported media sell audiences’ attention, not content, to advertisers #corroborates (0.75) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 219