Subprime Attention Crisis - online ads as the next 2008

Short and to the point.

I really appreciate that the author kept the length appropriate for how much information I, as a reader, actually needed about the topic. So many non-fiction books pad a single idea out to 400 pages. This one respects your time, and that alone puts it ahead of most of the genre.

It’s very well written too. The core of the book is an excellent comparison between the 2008 mortgage crisis and internet advertising today, backed by excellent information. The parallel that convinced me most was the opaqueness of the market. The argument builds towards a prediction: a correction in the value of online advertising is coming.

Do I buy the prediction? It makes a lot of sense to me, but nothing has come of it since I read it in early 2025. The correction just never seems to arrive. Still, the book did change one thing for me: it made me never want to run online ads.

There were a lot of interesting ideas in here, and plenty of things that make a lot of sense once laid out. I’m glad I spent the short time it took to read this, and it gets 5/5 from me. Honestly though, it’s pretty niche. The obvious reader is anyone looking to do online ads. If the plumbing of the ad-funded internet doesn’t interest you at all, you can safely skip it.