Tim Wu said this quote

“ We've already seen the attention merchant's basic modus operandi: draw attention with apparently free stuff and then resell it. but a consequence of that model is a total dependence on gaining and holding attention. This means that under competition, the race will naturally run to the bottom; attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative, whatever stimulus may more likely engage what cognitive scientists call our ''automatic'' attention as opposed to our ''controlled'' attention, the kind we direct with intent. The race to a bottomless bottom, appealing to what one might call the audience's baser instincts, poses a fundamental, continual dilemma for the attention merchant-just how far will he go to get his harvest? If the history of attention capture teaches us anything, it is that the limits are often theoretical, and when real, rarely self-imposed. ”

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Nothing, save the hangman's noose, concentrates the mind like piles of cash.

~ Tim Wu

As one might gather from a painting of him scowling in a tall stovepipe hat, Day saw himself as a businessman, not a journalist. ''He needed a newspaper not to reform, not to arouse, but to push the printing business of Benjamin H. Day.''Day's idea was to try selling a paper for a penny - the going price for many everyday items, like soap or brushes. At that price, he felt sure he could capture a much larger audience than his 6-cent rivals. But what made the prospect risky, potentially even suicidal, was that Day would then be selling his paper at a loss. What day was contemplating was a break with the traditional strategy for making profit: selling at a price higher than the cost of production. He would instead rely on a different but historically significant business model: reselling the attention of his audience, or advertising. What Day understood-more firmly, more clearly than anyone before him-was that while his readers may have thought themselves his customers, they were in fact his product.

~ Tim Wu

Every time you find your attention captured by a poster, your awareness, and perhaps something more, has, if only for a moment, been appropriated without your consent.

~ Tim Wu

The Church was the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention; and through its daily and weekly offices, as well as its sometimes central role in education, that is exactly what it managed to do. At the dawn of the attention industries, then, religion was still, in a very real sense, the incumbent operation, the only large-scale human endeavor designed to capture attention and use it.

~ Tim Wu