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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ryan Holiday
Read between
August 26 - October 1, 2019
The web has only one currency,
false perception.
“get the whole story into the headline but leave out just enough that people will want to click.
a good question brings twice the response of an emphatic exclamation point.
When you take away the question mark, it usually turns their headline into a lie.
intentionally exploit their ambivalence about deceiving people.
I trick the bloggers, and they trick their readers.
Movie reviews, in-depth tutorials, technical analysis, and recipes are typically popular with the initial audience and occasionally appear on most e-mailed lists. But they tend not to draw significant amounts of traffic from other websites.
practical utility is often a liability. It is a traffic killer.
The site doesn’t care about your opinion; it cares that, by eliciting it, they score free pageviews.
The best way to get online coverage is to tee a blogger up with a story that will obviously generate comments (or votes, or shares, or whatever).
Nobody involved actually cares what any of these people think
A click is a click
The headline is there to get you to view the article, end of story.
social media isn’t a set of tools to allow humans to communicate with humans. It is a set of embedding mechanisms to allow technologies to use humans to communicate with each other, in an orgy of self-organizing…. The Matrix had it wrong. You’re not the battery power in a global, human-enslaving AI, you are slightly more valuable. You are part of the switching circuitry. 1
“The weariness of the cell is the vigor of the organism.”
string the customer along as long as possible, to deliberately not be helpful, is to turn simple readers into pageview-generating machines.
“What’s infamy matter if you can keep your fortune?”
the very way that blogs get their articles in front of readers predetermines what they write.
The earliest forms of newspapers were a function of political parties. These
These political papers sold the service to businessmen, politicians, and voters.
the party press was not in the news business. They were in the editorial business.
Newspapers changed the moment that Benjamin Day launched the New York Sun in 1833.
It meant the decline of the editorial. These papers relied on gossip.
the newspaper’s role was “not to instruct but to startle.”
The One-Off Problem shaped more than just the design and layout of the newspaper.
their job was to cover the news when it was there and to make it up when it was not.
“We newspaper people thrive best on the calamities of others.”
Media historian W. J. Cambell once identified the distinguishing markers of yellow journalism as follows: • Prominent headlines that screamed excitement about ultimately unimportant news • Lavish use of pictures (often of little relevance) • Impostors, frauds, and faked interviews • Color comics and a big, thick Sunday supplement • Ostentatious support for the underdog causes • Use of anonymous sources • Prominent coverage of high society and events
Welcome to the intersection of the One-Off Problem and ad-driven journalism.
Adolph S. Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, ushered in the next iteration of news.
he made the pronouncement that “decency meant dollars.”
subscription did set forth new conditions in which the newspaper and the newspaperman had incentives more closely aligned with the needs of their readers.
A subscription model
news—offers necessary subsidies to the nuance that is lacking in the kind of stories that flourish in one-off distribution.
reputation began to matter more than notoriety.
it created a sense of obligation, not just to the paper and circulation, but also to the audience.
the press has imitated the principles he built into the New York Times since he took it over.
Today, the toxic economics of blogs are not only obscured, but tech gurus on the take actually defend them. We have the old problems plus a host of new ones.
Each story must sell itself, must be heard over all the others,
Competition for readers is on a per-article basis,
It is not by subscription.
the biggest sources of traffic are, usually, in this order: Google, Facebook, Twitter. The viewers were sent directly to a specific article for a disposable purpose: they’re not subscribers; they are seekers or glancers.
blogs are constantly chasing Other Readers—
They need stories that will sell.
Blogs must fight to be that story. You can provide them the ammunition.
Whereas subscriptions are about trust, single-use traffic is all immediacy and impulse
The reason subscription (and RSS) was abandoned was because in a subscription economy the users are in control.
So today, as RSS buttons disappear from browsers and blogs, just know that this happened on purpose, so that readers could be deceived more easily.
FOR MEDIA THAT LIVES AND DIES BY CLICKS (THE ONE-Off Problem) it all comes down to the headline.
