is a mostly good description of the current state of online advertising and draws useful comparisons to the state of financial markets around the time of thecrisis.
It falls a bit short in the prescriptions, however, which mostly fall along the lines of liberal, regulatory reformism and ignores a lot of the real power dynamics that are associated to the advertising economy.
I guess Id like a slightly more Marxist version of this book, but I appreciate what its trying to do, There is nothing particularly wrong with this book, but it is essentially a,star online longform news article stretched overpages, The idea is intriguing and although I have long expected something fishy is afoot with the profitability of companies like Facebook and Google, this was the first time I have seen it approached in the public sphere.
I would be more than happy to pay a monthly subscription for general internet use email in exchange for no or greatly reduced ads or spam, but I think the author's other suggested conclusion is more likely that an implosion of the digital ad economy will just result in a rebuilding of the same type of digital ad economy once the dust settles.
A fascinating thesis and bundle of ideas to explore, Great little book. I love a book that makes a claim that in five years time will be either eerily spot on or completely off the mark.
While this was certainly a thorough case study of the faulty online advertising industry, I don't think Tim Hwang focused enough on the reasons why the bubble popping would be so detrimental.
I would have preferred a nonfiction book more focussed on the impact such a crisis would present for the average person and the economy, rather than how the conditions for the crisis are currently being met.
The book is well written and well researched, As someone who works on the outskirts of the advertising economy, I have a passing familiarity with many of the topics discussed in this book.
I don't think that anything that he said was particularly wrong or bad, I just didn't feel particularly moved by the book, The kind of crux of the book is a comparison between thefinancial crash and the bubble of advertising, Lots of parallels to be drawn there for sure, Advertising is such a weird thing in how success is measured or not and the vast amounts of money poured into it, The author is right that there are problems to be fixed and it's not great for so many things search, news, videos to be totally dependent on advertising.
But at the same time, I just don't see a drop in advertising prices as something that will happen overnight or have as many negative impacts as proposed.
Sure people said the same thing about the shit mortgages inbut until banks are baking loans with CDOs where the collateral is ad space I don't think the pops will play out the same way.
Decent book though and if you don't know much about online ads give it a whirl, I've always been suspicious about the sustainability of the online advertising model, and this book is a good and easy read, confirming that suspicious, yet never fully convincing me that the bubble is really about to burst.
Dang, I have thoughts! Will write and post blog later once Ive thought more thoughtsstar writing,star creative idea for basing the book entirely on an extended metaphor thesubprime mortgage crisis as an analogue to the coming reckoning of “Hey, paid digital ads arent even CLOSE to as valuable as we thought they were!”
Bonus points for an awesome book cover and the decision “lets keep this topages instead of beating a dead horse for” In Subprime Attention Crisis Tim Hwang compares the current state of digital advertising to the years immediately before thefinancial crisis.
Hwang takes what may seem like a relatively dry topic online ads and breaks down how they work, how programmatic adbuying 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.
originally publishedOct,at sitelinkFalling Letters. I receivd a free copy from the publisher via Netgalley,
Subprime Attention Crisis is one of four titles launching on Tuesday Octoberthat comprise a collaboration between publishing imprint FSG Originals and tech magazine Logic.
To quote the blog post sitelinkannouncement, “the four books in the FSGO/Logic series are brief but provocative forays into the tech industrys 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, 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 its 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 Hwangs 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 hes telling me, Finally, I understand themortgage crisis, haha, I had to look it up in order to understand Hwangs 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.
Very well articulated on the opacity of programmatic buying leading to ad frauds, Also the growing skepticism on digital advertising, When I first heard Tim Hwang speak about Subprime Attention Crisis at Logic Book Festival, he began by saying that the problem with the discourse about Big Tech is that both its champions and its critics give it too much credit.
That is, the marketers overhype what the technology can do, and the rest of us are eating it right up, Anyone who's worked at a startup gets it: Engineering is always playing catchup to Sales's promises, His book, then, is a case study about why taking these claims at face value is not only gullible, but a threat to the health and stability of our digital economy.
Hwang argues that the modern digital ad market is on its way to becoming a bubble, much like the subprime mortgage crisis in.
Today, consumers ignore ads, Facebook and Google hide behind opaque, selfserving definitions of "views" and "conversions," and everything from overt fraud click farms to clever accounting FaceSubprime Attention Crisis's overstatement of video views runs rampant.
It feels like everyone, from the digital marketers to the industry researchers, has a perverse incentive to act like digital ads work better than they do, despite study after peerreviewed study questioning this assumption.
Hwang is also a fantastic econ teacherand I'm saying this as
someone who had no idea how thefinancial crisis worked until last summer.
He breaks down the programmatic ad market step by step, walks you through its similarities to the mortgage market of the late aughts, then provides numbered suggestions to reform the systemall in a tight littlepage volume.
With clever analogies e. g. one unit of attention: one fictionalized Standardized Chicken Lot and a clearcut narrative structure, you won't need a preexisting passion for twosided market design to get something out of this read.
By the end of the book, Hwang starts describing the social consequences of having the whole Internetfrom journalism to Google Mapsrun on ad dollars: surveillance capitalism, addictive feeds, political polarization.
Each of his carefully numbered arguments builds toward a picture of the ad industry as an increasingly precarious house of cards, so it's no surprise that he concludes that "Rather than trying to fix a broken market, we should work toward a controlled demolition that reduces its influence in the long run.
" Hwang ends by proposing a few of these possible reforms, such as industryindependent research organizations, mandatory disclosures for vendors of programmatic ads, and legal teeth to punish frauds.
Overall, I found Subprime Attention Crisis persuasive, if mildly hyperbolic: the narrow reforms proposed in the last few pages don't seem to match the urgency of the the crisislike descriptions of the first threequarters.
In my opinion, the bigger challenge of the nextoryearsand what I'm most interested in asking Hwang about next Thursdayis how we'll actually wean the web off ads and toward something more sustainable.
reviewed for the sitelinkreboot newsletter come to our sitelinkqampa on the book on/! This whole book basically argues that programmatic advertising, on which the entire internet economy is based, is a bubble growing larger and larger as it prepares to pop.
The ways in which the advertising industry today mirrors Wall Street before the Great Recession are compelling, If Hwang is right, we'll be talking about this book a lot a decade from now, If he's right, the internet as it is now might be unrecognizable in a decade, If he's right, we're in for a doozy of a time, And if what he predicts does not come to pass, it'll be because efforts were made to stop it,
One thing is for certain: I'm not sure I grasped the reliance of the internet as we know it now on ads before I read this book.
And another: we should decide on the future of the internet together, Instead, it increasingly feels as though it's left to Google and Facebook, and we just have to deal with 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 thecrisis, 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, I don't know that the catastrophizing of the book really matches themortgage crisis, so that analogy fell flat for me, Yet, the problems with the advertising and lack of attention was intriguing, at the very least to show the inner workings of the internet ad markets.
To my great regret, the book failed to thoroughly research a truly fascinating question it asked, Or, at least, it failed to convince me that it did,
I expected stern yet meticulous look into the digital advertising market, exposing the next big bubble, What I got instead is a bunch of farfetched parallels with the financial crisis ofwith very little insights into the actual ads market mechanics.
The book seem to be stuck in earlys most of the problems author lists as the potential indicators for the presence of a bubble has been addressed by the industry in the last decade.
For instance, while not impossible, it's much harder to find yourself overestimating the real value of the ads you buy when you pay per conversion not click model not even mentioned in the book.
Same goes for fraudulent clicks and nonvisible impressions we know how to work with it here in,
The book has a fascinating and engaging premise, but barely scratches the surface of exploring the real depth of the problem,
NB: The cover deserves fullstart though,
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Unlock The Secrets Of Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising And The Time Bomb At The Heart Of The Internet Penned By Tim Hwang Provided As Publication Copy
Tim Hwang