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, loc. 919