Likewise, no one ever bought a TV merely to keep up with the latest shampoos or tobacco products, much less to be persuaded to buy them. But the terms of the attention merchants’ contract with the public, which once had seemed so easy and appealing—“free” entertainment in exchange for a moment of your consideration—seemed suddenly to have been revised, and not in the viewers’ favor. Pitches were proliferating, and the programs themselves, their narrative logic, seemed more and more contorted to fit the pitches. The sense of being commerce’s dupe was setting in.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 514