Subprime Attention Crisis
by Tim Hwang · first published 2020
22mentions
11recommended by
20HN commenters
2020–2024first – last mentioned
52% recommend38% neutral10% critical
Why HN recommends it
Short, readable case that online advertising is a bubble: ad attention is opaque, often unseen and overpriced, like subprime mortgages. Suits people in or curious about adtech, and those who like economic analogies.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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Tim Hwang wrote an excellent short book that deals with this, Subprime Attention Crisis: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50403486-subprime-attent.... He addresses that most interactive advertising is never seen and prices are massively inflated. The attention is subprime, like subprime…
on “Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend” ↗There is this nice book on the subject called Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang, on why the whole ad industry might be a bubble. And this Freakonomics podcast episode on digital advertising https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/
on “Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend” ↗…an expert in any specific area will tell you that things seem weird and don't make sense. A great example of this is ad tech. I've worked in ad tech for many years and strongly agree with Tim Hwang's Subprime Attention Crisis. Everything is a house of cards, fraud (intentional or not) is wide spread. However one thing that Hwang (or anyone pointing out that our systems are houses of cards, scams, or otherwise unsound) fails…
on “The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme” ↗Agreed. Online advertising measurement remains opaque and there is no incentive to fix it. The book Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang does a good job covering this! (It is a solid bear case for fb,g,etc as well :p)
on “Ask HN: Does targeted advertising work at all?” ↗…adtech but saw a problem where model results were almost entirely random noise I got in huge trouble for pointing this out. Same is true across the board in the adtech world. Someone else recommended "Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang" and I very strongly recommend that you read this. It's very well researched and was so inline with my experience that I found it so obvious as to almost be dull.
on “Ask HN: Does targeted advertising work at all?” ↗…underlying asset's value. Advertising exemplifies this to a greater extent than agriculture: we don't really know what attention is, and so it's much easier (and more profitable) to misrepresent to buyers. Subprime Attention Crisis[1] is a really fantastic analysis of the attention market, this specific sort of commoditization, and its latent risks. [1]: https://www.fsgoriginals.com/books/subprime-attention-crisis
on “Human attention has become a commodity” ↗Thanks for sharing this article, I've already found 2 great book references, The Data Detective, and Subprime Attention Crisis. Edit: A third awesome book recommendation, Damon Knight's Why Do Birds Thanks for sharing this article, I treasure good writing like this.
on “Ad-Tech Is a Bezzle” ↗No has mentioned Subprime Attention Crisis yet. It’s worth reading. The whole thing is a hyper-inflated, opaque house of cards, and its collapse will cause a lot of pain.
on “The $300B Google-Meta advertising duopoly is under attack” ↗For the economist in you: There's a book on this topic that explicitly draws the parallels to the housing market meltdown, "Subprime Attention Crisis." There is also a professor at Columbia, Kinshuk Jerath, who has written explicitly about these misaligned incentives.
on “Ad blocking is under attack (2017)” ↗I don’t have experience but I thought Subprime Attention Crisis was an interesting read
on “We spent $20k on Google Play Pre-Registration Ads. Here are the results” ↗…hear or believe they dont really have any influence when the system is signalling they do. So the ponzi scheme grows larger and larger. There is a great book about it (from an ex-googler) called the Subprime Attention Crisis. No one knows what to do about it so everyones head is buried deep in the sand. We need new attention allocation systems that are not market driven.
on “Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]” ↗I recently read "Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet" by Tim Hwang. He argues that the internet ad market could crash soon because it isn't really delivering value anymore, or rather it delivers…
on “Ask HN: What will it take to destroy the ads market?” ↗Tim Hwang’s new book “Subprime attention crisis” talks a lot about this. The whole thing is a house of cards, based on the belief that better as targeting will yield better results, and they will squint at the numbers in any way possible to keep the…
on “Marketers are addicted to bad data” ↗…There is also an academic researcher who regularly publishes as well. https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mksc.2019.118... and of course there's Tim Hwang. https://www.fsgoriginals.com/books/subprime-attention-crisis Internet ads do not work past simple location based targeting.
on “Facebook is pushing back on Apple’s new iPhone privacy rules” ↗…spectrum for over a decade and think their is a lot of good reason to be skeptical of the claims of the advertising world. Tim Hwang is also an insider in this industry and wrote an entire book (The Subprime Attention Crisis) on the issues with the current state of advertising. I work in a very different area from Tim (he's legal) but I can tell you that book almost bored me with how obvious all of his complaints where. >…
on “I stopped advertising and nothing happened” ↗