Most important for the board, Pittman brought with him the business mind-set of the New York media industries. At the time, in its search for revenue alternatives, AOL thought it could perhaps sell books, or offer its own brand of telephone services.*5 But on first look Pittman noticed that AOL had millions of customers staring at screens, and instantly concluded that its financial future was as an attention merchant. No matter that AOL had distinguished itself in the early 1990s as “ad-free” (in contrast to Prodigy). After years of building the AOL brand and attracting millions of customers, it was now time to “leverage the asset,” or, in Pittman's alternative terminology, time to “harvest.”

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 727