What Happens When Digital Advertising Collapses?

📬 Note from the Publisher

The Attention Economy Is a Lemon. Here’s Why We’re Not Selling It.
By Peter Cellino | July 2025

Tim Hwang’s Subprime Attention Crisis is not your typical “tech is scary” beach read. It’s more like an economic crime thriller set inside a Google server farm. His central claim is simple and devastating: the digital advertising industry—the engine that underwrites most of the modern internet—is built on garbage data, fake impressions, click fraud, and the fantasy that targeting is effective. The result? An attention marketplace that looks a lot like the mortgage market circa 2007: bloated, broken, and primed to crash.

If you run a media company that relies on programmatic ads, this book is a funeral bell. If you run Mercury Local, it’s confirmation you bet the farm on the right thing.

We built Charlotte Mercury, Strolling Ballantyne, and The Farmington Mercury on the belief that the real value of journalism comes from depth, privacy, and actual human trust—not CPM arbitrage or shady retargeting. That’s why:

• We don’t run Google Ads.
• We don’t track your clicks or follow you across the web.
• Our advertisers are real businesses in your ZIP code.
• And our revenue model is simple: be useful, be honest, and never sell out your audience.

We aren’t trying to sell your attention. We’re trying to earn it.

🛒 If you want to read Subprime Attention Crisis;💡It would be even better if you bought it from your local independent bookseller—assuming you’re lucky enough to have one still. There are too few of them, and we need more bookstores, not more UX designers at Facebook.

The adtech crash is coming. We’ll be here when it does. And we won’t sell you out for an extra tenth of a clickthrough rate.

☕ Peter Cellino is the founder of Mercury Local and publisher of CLTMercury.com, StrollingBallantyne.com, and WeAreFarmington.com. He drinks iced cold brew from Einstein Bros. in Ballantyne and tries very hard not to read the comments. Follow him on Bluesky at @pc51.bsky.social.

🪪 License: CC BY-ND 4.0