Attention merchants must manage advertising volume to avoid audience resentment.

Evidence

Knowing how to keep the pot simmering without boiling over in public protest, Paley proactively set limits on CBS’s advertising; among them, he cut its share of airtime to 10 percent and banned commercials considered offensive. At the risk of giving him too much credit, one could say that such policies not only kept critics at bay but also showed a shrewd awareness of the attention merchant’s eternal dilemma: too little advertising and the business can’t grow; too much and the listener grows resentful and tunes out. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 358

Categorization

• DEFINE: States the attention merchant’s core optimization dilemma explicitly: too little ad airtime starves growth, too much drives listeners away.
• XREF: Parallels the advertising-load balancing of later attention industries like digital platforms. — connects to: Audience backlash against attention capture can trigger industry-wide regulation and reinvention — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 72

Broader Connections

• Audience backlash against attention capture can trigger industry-wide regulation and reinvention #expands (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 72