The attention merchant had always tried to reach as broad an audience as possible, bombarding them with as many ads as they'd stand before going into total revolt. Such had been the strategy in television since Pat Weaver first introduced the commercial break: cram fourteen to sixteen minutes of ad time into every hour, along with a further three to seven minutes of other forms of branding, eating up roughly one third of the broadcast; the content was devised essentially to cue up the ads, with a little cliffhanger before each one.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 888