Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet (FSG Originals x Logic)

Advertising, in theory, is the business of buying and selling human attention. And though the ad business makes up only a small portion of the overall Attention Economy, it plays a massive role in shaping almost every other business.

Yet, ours is not truly an information economy. By definition, economics is the study of how a society uses its scarce resources. And information is not scarce - especially on the Net, where it is not only abundant, but overflowing. We are drowning in information, yet constantly increasing our generation of it. So a key question arises: Is there som... See more

Advertising. It rewards publishers for merely attracting attention, rather than creating things people genuinely value. When this is the dominant model for funding media, the media becomes dominated by sensationalism, frivolities, conspiracies, and tribalism.

Most of this came to him in the mid-1980s, when Mr. Goldhaber, a former theoretical physicist, had a revelation. He was obsessed at the time with what he felt was an information glut — that there was simply more access to news, opinion and forms of entertainment than one could handle. His epiphany was this: One of the most finite resources in the w... See more