Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet

This is a very short book in which the author claims the fundamental advertising model behind the internet is broken. The basic idea of banner ads is flawed, he says. No one clicks on them, they don’t drive sales, and it’s all a rickety con that’s destined to collapse.

I don’t totally disagree – “mainstream” internet advertising has always been a mess. But he wrote the book four years ago, and the industry still seems to be going strong, so his “brink of collapse” argument might not hold water.

He makes an interesting point about the “commoditization of attention.” He has an analogy about buying and selling chickens. You can evaluate and buy an actual, physical group of chickens, but that takes time. Or a seller can just bundle chickens into a “standard chicken unit,” and you can just buy and sell those. You’re disconnected from the actual chickens. You’re just buying and selling the “idea” of a chicken.

Problems generally result from this. You can’t help but remember the housing crisis of 2007, when mortgages were bundled this way. The value and effectiveness of this depends on who is evaluating the bundles, and in the case of the mortgages, that was flawed.

Same thing here. The author argues that internet advertising is bought in abstract “units of attention.” He details the insane advertising “exchanges” that operated in milliseconds to deliver ads to your browser. No human has evaluated this – attention is being bought and sold in units that may or may not correspond to actual human attention and buying patterns.

He notes in several cases that companies simply eliminated their web advertising budgets, and nothing bad happened. They saw no effect on their profitability and sales.

Again, it’s a short book. He makes a pretty powerful case, but doesn’t belabor it, which I appreciated.

Book Info