Early web attention circulated person-to-person without commercial resale, undercutting attention merchants.

Evidence

Let us now take account of what was happening economically. The attention merchants had developed a business model based on directing the public mind toward commercial, well-packaged media products on television. But as the web grew in popularity, people started to pay more attention to one another instead, with no money changing hands. Bloggers did not, at first anyway, advertise, just as friends in the course of conversation do not usually plan to resell the attention they’ve gained by shilling for a product. … The ones suffering for this happy state of affairs were those industries that had spent the past century devising how best to get people to look at them and listen, to enjoy their diversion and tolerate a word from their sponsors. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 919

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the counterculture chapter’s ‘Great Refusal’ and foreshadows how platforms later re-captured that attention for resale. — connects to: Attention merchants profit by colonizing previously uncommercialized spaces of awareness. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 17; The first consumer online services were conceived as attention-reselling advertising platforms. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 703; Print incumbents’ caution ceded web attention to new entrants — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 904 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Commercial attention harvesting overwhelmed the web from within, not from outside #contradicts (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 923
• Early internet buzz did not yet translate into commercial success #corroborates (0.85) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 191
• The early internet’s value lay precisely in sheltering niche subcultures from mainstream attention #corroborates (0.80)