Great book, shows a plethora insights on the attention crisis in the modern world, would highly recommend, Can't wait for more books from this author.

I would like to thank NetGalley and the author Tim Hwang for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book.

The book goes over the fascinating relationship between financial markets and the advertising marketplace. Specifically the relationship between the finance industry and the evolution of the modern programmatic advertising ecosystem. The author believes that the financial foundations of the web are perhaps shakier than we imagine, maybe even leading to a so-called “subprime” crisis such as the one that hit the global economy in 2008. He questions whether the web as we know it will endure.

As digital advertising grows and disrupts traditional advertising channels, the latter wither and shrink, thus reducing advertising alternatives and further driving dollars into digital.

In the Advertising marketplace, marketing agencies and the marketplace itself have systematic incentives to oversell the value and price of advertising inventory regardless of issues like fraud, declining attention, and ad blocking.

The author proposes that rather than fearing a collapse of the global digital advertising markets we should used it as an opportunity to use alternative business models and for the internet itself to take a different shape as well. At the same it's suggested that it will be all around better and less painful to proactively create a controlled implosion than to just let things fall apart on their own.

The triggering of the controlled disruption of the programmatic advertising market will depend on a crisis of confidence in it. This in turn can be driven by reducing confidence in the measurability and effectiveness of the market. Another element deemed necessary by the writer would be the implementation of mandatory disclosure laws in the market.

Overall, the book presents an interesting premise. As the author himself admits, at the time off publication Oct 2020, everything looks pretty great in the programmatic advertising markets and for its participants. It will be interesting to see what happens in the next few years to the author's predictions. The book is relatively short and clearly written. The reader just has to decide whether or not to buy into the ideas presented.

This is one of four books being published as part of an FSGxLogic magazine series on issues affecting Silicon Valley and the modern internet. This was a fascinating primer on how internet advertising used to work and presently works, and why there are increasing similarities between the "attention" economy and the financial crisis from 2008 in terms of valuation and actual value.

I enjoyed this, but I would have love something calibrated one step more towards the "layman" side. I'm techy, but this took a LOT of focus at times to catch what Tim Hwang was saying. This is a great topic that deserves further explanation, but I might have needed the boil-down that would appear like something like Wired magazine instead of this in-depth breakdown.

Subprime Attention Crisis is one of four titles launching on Tuesday October 13 that comprise a collaboration between publishing imprint FSG Originals and tech magazine Logic. To quote the blog post announcement, “the four books in the FSGO/Logic series are brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, inciting fresh conversations focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools reorganizing and redefining life today”.

Regular readers know such topics are a far cry from the usual content reviewed on my blog. But this title caught my eye as I browsed Netgalley. Internet advertising has a significant impact on anyone reading this. We all see it (even when we diligently use an adblocker). Maybe you have advertising on your blog. Most importantly: we all depend on it as the foundation that supports how the Internet currently functions.

Hwang argues that ineffective internet advertising has built up around inaccurate and unreliable metrics. I thought I knew the basics of how internet advertising works. I learnt a lot more about it from this book. These metrics, along with other factors that Hwang explores, mean the system is poised to fail as the markets did in 2008. As the title implies, Hwang draws comparisons throughout the book to the subprime mortgage crisis. Internet advertising faces a ‘subprime attention crisis’. Why should we care about the potential failure of online advertising, which for most of us is little more than an irritant? Because it’s currently the key that allows us to freely access websites and the information contained within. Hwang concludes with broad suggestions of how the industry might anticipate such a failure and begin to mitigate it.

The nature of Hwang’s subject lends itself to mildly technical language. It reminded me of reading textbooks in university. I can understand the topic generally, but I need to focus to really comprehend what he’s telling me. Finally, I understand the 2008 mortgage crisis, haha. I had to look it up in order to understand Hwang’s comparison.

💭 The Bottom Line: Subprime Attention Crisis may require focused attention from a layperson to comprehend, but its relatively short length and important topic make it a good read for anyone who cares about the long term sustainability of the Internet as we know it.

If you also are wondering "how on Earth internet has gone so wrong," this is a book for you. The answer is surprisingly simple: much of the blame can be put on the programmatic advertising. The history of how it happened is explained in detail in another book I am currently reading and highly recommend, "The Tangled Web We Weave" by James Ball, while Tim Hwang is more focused on its actual mechanisms. The main argument of this book is a convincing parallel to financial markets and the 2008 crisis. Moreover, in the spirit of "solution journalism," the author advises on how to avoid the explosion of the "subprime" attention bubble. It can be a bit challenging read for someone who isn't much into financial issues, but it is worth the effort.

The book is a part of a very interesting series, FSG Original x Logic, which dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives.

Thanks to the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

In Subprime Attention Crisis Tim Hwang compares the current state of digital advertising to the years immediately before the 2008 financial crisis. Hwang takes what may seem like a relatively dry topic - online ads - and breaks down how they work, how programmatic ad-buying has changed things, and why these conditions have created a bubble in a way that was eminently readable. I found Hwang's arguments to be compelling, but this book is worth reading even just as an explainer to how online ads work and how our time online is commodified. Anyone who uses social media should be aware of how platforms track, package, and sell your presence online to advertisers and the possible and real ramifications of that business model.

Hwang’s book takes a deep dive into the inner workings of the adtech industry and compares it, convincingly and in detail, to the subprime mortgage crisis that kicked off the 2008 global economic crisis. Where the industry (dominated by Google and Facebook, with ad auctioneers busy in the background) likes us to think they are “data-driven wizards of consumer persuasion,” they are actually at the helm of a rickety structure riven by “perverse incentives, outright fraud, and a web economy on the brink.” Yeah, that sounds eerily familiar.

Like the financial systems that used lightning-fast algorithmic predictions and computerized transactions to buy and sell derivatives that grew increasingly risky, the adtech industry suffers from a similar combination of hubris and opaque complexity that’s impossible to analyze clearly. Hwang draws an intriguing lesson from James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State. To administer power over a large population, you need “legibility” – a way of identifying and tabulating humans and their behavior. To do this, platforms are designed to appropriate data in order to administer ads.

Though these companies collect an incredibly vast amount of data in violation of our privacy, legibility is one-way. In spite of data about click-throughs and impressions, nobody who places an ad can tell where it will end up or whether it is actually effective. A few big corporations have an outsize impact and no incentives to improve transparency or even simple accuracy. Hwang cites a claim Facebook once made about its ability to reach a coveted American youth demographic, stating it could put ads in front of 25 million more people in that age range than actually live in the entire US; its disastrous “pivot to video” claims cost media companies time, energy, and a lot of money.

What’s more, those dollars are chasing a dwindling audience, especially among younger people who increasingly use ad blockers, and a lot of the attention metrics are fraudulent. Many ads are never seen by anyone, and a large percentage of the “viewers” for those “seen” are non-human, automated systems designed to pump up the numbers. Hwang provides an in-depth analysis of how the financial incentives parallel the subprime mortgage crisis: people have more money to spend than they have places to put it. Google and Facebook not only absorb most digital ad dollars, they are replacing the media outlets that depend on ads – newspapers, for instance. As more people get their news directly through ad-driven platforms, traditional and new media watch their ability to influence the ad industry leached away, along with attention.

Hwang names, though doesn’t spend much time on, the anti-social tendencies of ad-driven persuasion, but urges us to recognize an economic bubble that will soon burst. The longer it has to grow, the more damaging the consequences. He urges us to imagine an alternative and to do a “controlled demolition” to avoid disaster. He argues for independent industry research to inform our understanding of digital advertising’s effects, legal protection for whistle-blowers, and recommends a regulatory overhaul similar to those imposed after the 1929 crash as a model for public accountability and the rebuilding of a more robust, bubble-proof internet. Apparently it’s one that might still be largely financed by advertising, (I wasn’t sure) but it would be less fraudulent and opaque.

"The internet we have, for better or worse, is yoked to the structure and prospects of the advertising economy by the business models, companies, and economics that have dominated over the last few decades. If this system of advertising is brittle, then the internet as we know it is brittle. Whether we leave these marketplaces deregulated and feral or implement systems to manage them for public benefit will define not just the future of advertising, but the future of the technologies that have shaped and continue to shape our society."

Hwang’s focus is on advertising as the financial backbone of the internet. The problems caused by giant corporations and their data-sucking assaults on privacy isn’t so much that they suck data, in his estimation, as that they suck at advertising, yet have been able to build fortunes through misleading and increasingly ineffective practices.

Having heard Hwang speak before, I knew this book would be informative and a quick read--and it was. Honestly, I would have enjoyed a few more chapters in conclusion, on exactly what the coming crisis is.

In Subprime Attention Crisis, Tim Hwang initiates an upsetting conversation about not only the relationship of social media to advertising (which latter supports social media and causes it to remain free) but about the possibility that the many free services that enable internet users to explore products and news could suddenly be found behind a paywall. It could happen. If advertising is contingent upon the public having free access, how far down would sales be driven by the abrupt necessity to pay for each service, much as one pays for TV programming apps? It does not take too many pages--or paragraphs--for the author to draw the reader's attention to the fact that the online advertising edifice is a wobbly thing. The description of the algorithm-driven process by which programmatic advertising takes place is very damaging to the confidence of anyone counting on such advertising to boost sales..He then demonstrates the interwoven supporting structure of the entire global market with examples. Hwang's description, best suited to understanding by familiarized online advertising experts, goes some distance in helping readers grasp the (lack of) logic behind the placement of advertisements they see. This book seems to be an important study in online marketing and its interconnection with the rest of the global economy. Marketing teachers would do well to consider choosing Subprime Attention Crisis for their classes, if for nothing else than critical thinking and planning. #SubprimeAttentionCrisis #NetGalley