Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator

by Ryan Holiday

Publishers and advertisers can’t differentiate between the types of impressions an ad does on a site.

A click is a click.

Every decision a publisher makes is ruled by one dictum: traffic by any means.

Scoops Are Traffic

TMZ turned scoop-getting into a science.

Exclusives build blogs. Scoops equal traffic.

exclusive scoops are rare,

So greedy blogs have perfected what is called the “...

pretend they have a scoop

Only after did I begin to understand how blog fortunes were made: off the backs of others.

Media was once about protecting a name; on the web it is about building one.

Blogs are built on scoops and traffic, and this is made possible by big names.

Bringing in big (online) names is now a go-to move for sites trying to build traffic.

All these bloggers,

Their strategy is the same as their publisher’s: Build a brand by courting controversy, breaking big scoops, driving comments, and publishing constantly.

blogs are not intended to be profitable and independent businesses.

Blogs are built to be sold. Though they make substantial revenues from advertising, the real money is in selling the entire site to a larger company for a multiple of the traffic and earnings. Usually to a rich sucker.

Blogs are built and run with an exit in mind.

Each blog is its own mini-Ponzi scheme, for which traffic growth is more important than solid financials, brand recognition more important than trust, and scale more important than business sense.

shady business deals and conflicts of interest abound in this world.

Michael Arrington, the loudmouth founder and former editor in chief of TechCrunch, is famous for investing in the start-ups that his blogs would then cover.

Nick Denton of Gawker is also a prolific investor in his own space, often putting money in companies founded by employees who left his company or were fired.

influence can also be abused for profit through strategic investments

In this world, where the rules and ethics are lax, a third player can exert massive influence. Enter: the media manipulator.

the media is too busy chasing profits to bother trying to stop us.

the criteria that bloggers’ employers use to determine the size of their paycheck—the stuff bloggers are paid for—can be co-opted and turned into an indirect bribe.

Put aside any notion that applicants are chosen based on skill, integrity, or a love of their craft.

quickness.

The payment structure of blogging reflects this emphasis on speed over other variables, such as quality, accuracy, or how informative the content might be.

Professional blogging is done in the boiler room, and it is brutal.

left the pay-per-post model and switched to a pageview-based compensation system that gave bonuses to writers based on their monthly traffic figures.

You can imagine what kind of results this led to.

This is now the standard model for blogs.

These kinds of rates force channels big and small to churn out videos constantly to make money. Every view is only a penny in their pocket.

Twitter users are straight-up mercenary.

If all these numbers sound small—and they do to me—it isn’t simply because bloggers are getting shafted. It’s because what they produce isn’t worth all that much.

if bloggers want to get rich—or even cover their rent—they’ve got to find other ways to get paid.

One of the quickest ways to get coverage for a product online is to give it away for free to bloggers

The easiest way for bloggers to make real money is to transition to a job with an old media company or a tech company.

This revolving door has a peculiar influence on coverage, as is to be expected. What blogger is going to do real reporting on companies like Google, Facebook, or Twitter when there is the potential for a lucrative job down the road?

If you invest early in a blogger, you can buy your influence very cheaply.

In the pay-per-pageview model, every post is a conflict of interest.

Bloggers have a direct incentive to write bigger, to write simpler, to write more controversially or, conversely, more favorably, to write without having to do any work, to write more often than is warranted.

Journalists are rarely in a position to establish the truth of an issue themselves,

anyone selling a product, a message, or an agenda.

Quotes and tips are drawn from unsolicited, untraced e-mails or angry comments pulled from comments sections, or sent in by people who have something to gain from it.

the online-driven news cycle is going a million miles a minute

This creates endless opportunities for people like me to slip in and twist things to my liking.

Blogs love press releases. It does every part of their job for them:

So I started putting out press releases all the time.