Subprime Attention Crisis Review

 I recently read Tim Hwang's Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet.  Hwang draws a strong comparison between technological advances of the digital marketing industry, to the financial industry.  The way digital advertising auctions have been automated is very similar to the way financial exchanges have been automated.  This may not have been coincidental, and in fact a number of the tech/marketing executives responsible for the development of the modern digital advertising business model, are former Wall St executives. 

The advancement of digital advertising have been very fast and transformative to the industry. This speed of development often leads to opacities. Hwang argues that these opacities are not unlike the cloudiness that led to the 2008 financial crisis.

Reading this book did not make me feel urgent concern for the state of the industry. Hwang also acknowledges that most agree that digital marketing is expected to keep growing strongly in the immediate future.  However; it did introduce a different perspective I hadn't considered before. I do now think there is more fragility in the industry than I previously thought. If tech companies were no longer able to capture and commodify our attentions at the same level, the trickle down effects could be large scale and immediate. Tech companies are heavily reliant on advertising revenues; even though that was not in their original business plans (ex. Google).  The reader of Hwang's book is prompted to imagine an internet where many free services we rely on suddenly came at a cost. Imagine paying a membership fee to use social media sites like Facebook and Instagram. What if you had to pay every time you wanted to look up directions in Google Maps? The downstream impact of turmoil in digital advertising space could be tremendous. Regardless of how probable that outcome is, it is important to be continually cognizant of how much the internet we know today is dependent on the success of the digital marketing industry.