Refusing direct payment for endorsements paradoxically maximized an attention merchant’s power.

Evidence

Given such power, a less sophisticated attention merchant might have simply sought to sell endorsements outright (as subsequent corporatized personalities like the 2010s reality TV star Kim Kardashian have done). But whether out of ethical considerations, or an astute sense of preserving her credibility capital, or both, Winfrey never accepted payment for on-air endorsements. By never selling out explicitly as another flogger of products, she remained unpredictable, her power only growing as a result. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 799

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This inverts the naive view that monetizing attention directly is the winning play: credibility capital compounds when the merchant stays unpredictable and above suspicion — a genuinely counterintuitive mechanism worth sitting with.
• XREF: Mirrors the diamond industry’s finding that reputation and trust substitute for formal sanction — credibility capital functions like social capital in Milgrom and Bernheim.