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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ryan Holiday
Read between
August 26 - October 1, 2019
blogs’ blind faith in press releases presents opportunities.
It’s stunning how much news is now driven by such releases
Anyone can give blogs their talking points.
It’s a great time to be a media manipulator when your marks actually love receiving PR pitches.
Bloggers are under incredible pressure to produce,
Writers are at the mercy of official sources,
Most important, they’re at the mercy of Wikipedia, because that’s where they do their research.
I commonly see uniquely worded or selectively edited facts that paid editors inserted into Wikipedia show up later in major newspapers and blogs
Even a subtle influence over the way that Wikipedia frames an issue
can have a major impact on the way bloggers write about it.
It’s why you have to control your page.
HARO (Help a Reporter Out), and it is a site that connects hundreds of “self-interested sources” to willing reporters every day.
It is the de facto sourcing and lead factory for journalists and publicists.
If I was tasked with building someone’s reputation as an “industry expert,” it would take nothing but a few fake e-mail addresses and speedy responses to the right bloggers to manufacture the impression.
It is a tool that manufactures self-promotion to look like research.
What HARO encourages—and the site is filled with thousands of posts asking for it—is for journalists to look for sources who simply confirm what they were already intending to say.
HARO also helps bloggers create the false impression of balance.
Most stories online are created with this mind-set. Marketing shills masquerade as legitimate experts,
“If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.”
Every blog, publisher, and oversharer in your Facebook feed is constantly looking to post things that will take on a life of their own
I design what I sell to bloggers based on what I know (and they think) will spread.
“if something is a total bummer, people don’t share it.”
unsettling images are not conducive to sharing.
the web is not some fair or positive meritocracy,
“the most powerful predictor of virality is how much anger an article evokes” [emphasis mine]. I will say it again: The most powerful predictor of what spreads online is anger.
The angrier an article makes the reader, the better.
Sadness depresses our impulse for social sharing.
No marketer is ever going to push something with the stink of reasonableness, complexity, or mixed emotions.
marketers and publishers to conspire to distort this information into something that will register on the emotional spectrum of the audience.
The media is in the evil position of needing to go negative and play tricks with your psyche in order to drive you to share their material online.
Things must be negative but not too negative. Hopelessness, despair—these drive us to do nothing. Pity, empathy—those drive us to do something, like get up from our computers to act. But anger, fear, excitement, or laughter—these drive us to spread.
media manipulation becomes simply a matter of packaging and presentation.
always look for an angle that will provoke.
If I could generate a reaction, I could propel the ad from being something I had to pay for people to see (by buying ad inventory) to something people would gladly post on the front page of their highly trafficked websites.
The idea wasn’t ever to sell products directly through the ads themselves,
the notion of a company running pornographic advertisements on legitimate blogs would be too arousing (no pun intended) for share-hungry sites and readers to resist.
I made it my strategy to manufacture chatter by exploiting emotions of high valence: arousal and indignation.
A slight slap on the wrist or pissing off some prudes was a penalty well worth paying for, for all the attention and money we got.
the act of constantly provoking and fooling people has a larger cost.
Rick Santelli had a somewhat awkward meltdown
CNBC
had something valuable on their hands. Instead of waiting for the video to be discovered by bloggers, news junkies, message boards, and mash-up artists, CNBC posted it on their own website immediately.
“Humiliation should not be suppressed. It should be monetized.”
the degree of amusement being determined by where the viewers fit on the political spectrum.
everyone’s reactions were so extreme that few of them were able see it for what it truly was: a mildly awkward news segment that should have been forgotten.
CNBC fell ass first into the perfect storm of what spreads on the web
“In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion.”
We’re all feeding that monster.
viral content may disappear, its consequences do not—be it a toxic political party or an addiction to cheap and easy attention.
Through the selective mechanism of what spreads—and gets traffic and pageviews—we get suppression not by omission but by transmission.
