In 1833 a young printer named Benjamin Day launched a New York newspaper called the Sun and sold it for a penny, when most papers cost six cents. He could not cover his costs at that price, and he did not need to. The Sun made its money from advertisers, who paid to reach its large readership, drawn in by cheap news, crime stories and human interest. The legal scholar Tim Wu, in his 2016 book The Attention Merchants, treats Day as an early master of a business that has since spread across the world: gathering attention and reselling it.

Scarcity in a world of plenty

In 1971 the economist Herbert Simon, who later won a Nobel Prize, made a point that now looks prophetic. Information, he observed, consumes something: the attention of the people who receive it. So an abundance of information creates a scarcity of attention. When attention is the scarce good, the real task for any organization is not to provide more information but to allocate the limited attention of its audience wisely. In the 1990s writers such as Michael Goldhaber pushed the idea further and popularized the phrase the attention economy, in which attention behaves like a currency that people and companies compete to earn.

The two-sided market

Many of the most used services on Earth, from search engines to social networks to free video sites, follow the model Day pioneered. They are two-sided markets: users get a free service on one side, while advertisers pay to reach them on the other. A company's revenue then depends on how much time and attention it can capture and how precisely it can target ads. That creates pressure to track figures such as daily active users, minutes spent and sessions per day, usually grouped under the word engagement.

A popular slogan sums up the critics' view: if you are not paying for the product, you are the product. Wu and others argue that this arrangement quietly sets a company's interests against its users'. A user may want to check one message and leave; the business earns more if the user stays.

The case for the model

Defenders make serious points in return. First, the ad-supported model has made information free to billions who could not pay for subscriptions, including people in poor countries. Second, selling attention is old. Newspapers, radio and broadcast television all relied on advertising, and few people think a free radio station exploits its listeners. Third, users are not passive. They choose services, complain, leave and organize, and companies that annoy them can lose them. Economists add that engagement is not only a trick: people spend time on things they value, so time spent is partly a sign that a service is useful.

The fair conclusion is that the model is neither a villain nor neutral. Its central weakness is that engagement is a proxy, and time spent can reflect compulsion as well as value. Minutes on a site can measure enjoyment or usefulness, but they can also measure outrage, boredom or a habit the user would rather break. When a stand-in measure becomes the target, it can drift away from the thing it was meant to track.

What is different now

Earlier attention merchants faced natural limits. A newspaper was printed once a day; a television schedule ended at night. Digital services face fewer limits. They are always available, carried in a pocket, and able to adjust themselves to each user. They do this through A/B tests, which compare two versions of a feature to see which performs better: which headline, button or feed order keeps people around longer. Large companies run thousands of these experiments at once. The result is not one evil design but an enormous process of trial and error that selects for whatever holds attention, whether or not it serves the person giving it.

This raises a question that matters for a school built on human dignity. Treating people as audiences is not new and not always wrong; a theater sells tickets to an audience and nobody is harmed. But a system that treats a person's attention only as a means to revenue, with no regard for that person's own purposes, sits uneasily with the principle that people should never be used merely as tools.

Worked example: a free recipe app

Lena downloads a free recipe app because she wants a soup recipe for dinner. The company earns money from video ads shown between recipes, and its dashboard tracks minutes per session. Two designs are tested. Design A puts the recipe at the top, ingredients first, then the steps. Design B opens with a long personal story, a video and a row of suggested recipes, with the steps further down. Design B wins the test: sessions are longer and more ads are seen. Yet Lena is irritated, and some users give up and go elsewhere. Which design is better? By the engagement metric, B. By Lena's goal, A. The distance between those answers is the distance between engagement and value. Nobody at the company is plotting against her; they are following a number. A wiser company might measure whether users actually cooked the meal, or how often they return by choice the following week. The example shows how a two-sided market can pull design toward the advertiser's side unless someone measures what users want.