The first consumer online services were conceived as attention-reselling advertising platforms.

Evidence

Prodigy pushed ideas that wouldn’t come to real fruition until at least a decade later. From its beginnings in 1989, it saw itself reselling the attention directed to computer screens. “IBM and Sears executives envisioned a new advertising medium,” wrote Wired in 1993, “that would assemble audiences for marketers much as niche TV channels do.” It believed that if its content was good enough and the service were cheap enough to attract a crowd, it would eventually attract enough eyeballs to resell for profit. “Visionaries at IBM and Sears figured they could sell advertising on every screen and tap a potential revenue stream far larger than the sum of the hourly fees charged by existing online services.” Like the penny press, Prodigy sought its mass audience by offering a low price—$9.95 a month, a money-loser unless advertising paid off. Unfortunately, unlike the New York Sun, revenue didn’t meet expenses, and by the early 1990s Prodigy had lost hundreds of millions. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 703

Categorization

• XREF: Directly echoes the penny press business model (low price to build audience, then resell that attention to advertisers) covered in earlier chapters of this same book. — connects to: Free digital services are paid for by users’ attention.; Prodigy pioneered advertising, subscription content, and online shopping models that later giants adopted — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 741; Advertising converted attention into revenue by selling consumers a receding ideal — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 225 (+9 more)
• ADDENDUM: Useful historical precedent for any piece on platforms as attention markets

Broader Connections

• Advertising industrialized attention by converting it into a resellable commodity #expands (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 24
• AOL pivoted from ad-free service to monetizing its user base as an attention merchant #exemplifies (0.80) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 727
• Early web attention circulated person-to-person without commercial resale, undercutting attention merchants. #qualifies (0.78) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 919
• Advertising converted attention into revenue by selling consumers a receding ideal #expands (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 225
• Mass-scale attention harvesting began with advertising in the 1890s-1920s #expands (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 24
• Early advertising converted human attention into cash by creating demand #expands (0.72) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 76
• Platform profits come from harvesting user attention and selling it back to advertisers #expands (0.72) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 43
• Targeted advertising was foundational to surveillance capitalism’s origins #expands (0.72) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 202
• Large agencies industrialized advertising into an endless machine for attention capture #expands (0.72) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 183
• Early digital commerce promised personalized consumption aligned with genuine consumer interests #complicates (0.70) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 143