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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ryan Holiday
Read between
August 26 - October 1, 2019
blog headlines are “naked little creatures that have to go out into the world to stand and fight on their own.”
Each blog is competing not just to be the leader on a particular story but against all the other topics a reader could potentially commit to reading about (and also against checking e-mail, chatting with friends, and watching videos, or even pornography).
“People respond to and are deceived by the same things they were a hundred years ago.”
an online publisher today is that it has no such buffer.
exaggeration and lies and bogus tags
headlines are not intended to represent the contents of articles but to sell them
Each headline competes with every other headline. On a blog, every page is the front page.
“How can we make our item stick out from all the other ones?”
The question is not “Was this headline accurate?” but “Was it clicked more than the others?”
It should be clear what types of headlines blogs are interested in.
Come up with the idea and let them think they were the ones who came up with it.
Only the reader gets stuck with the buyer’s remorse.
THE BREAKTHROUGH FOR BLOGGING AS A BUSINESS was the ability to track what gets read and what doesn’t.
Editors and analysts know what spreads, what draws traffic, and what doesn’t, and they direct their employees accordingly.
To ignore these numbers in an era of pageview journalism is business suicide for bloggers and media manipulators.
This is about getting pageviews—by whatever means.
today it is a science.
Sites employ full-time data analysts to ensure that the absolute worst is brought out of the audience.
Gawker.com/stats.
For some blog empires, the content-creation process is now a pageview-centric checklist that asks writers to think of everything except “Is what I am making any good?”
How many pageviews will this content generate? Is this story SEO-winning for in-demand terms? How can we modify it to include more terms? Can we bring in contributors with their own followers? What CPM will this content earn? How much will this content cost to produce? How long will it take to produce?
“One can be certain,” he said, “that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be idiocy because it has been able to appeal to the majority.”
blogs have picked a handful of the most straightforward and cost-effective metrics to rely on
these ill-conceived metrics—based on simplicity more than anything else—make bloggers do awful things.
“Simplistic measurements matter.”
Not every story is intended to be a home run—a collection of singles, doubles, and triples adds up too. Pageview journalism is about scale.
one of the best ways to turn yourself into a favorite and regular subject is to make it clear your story is a reliable traffic draw.
Once sites see there is traffic in something, they do not stop
the lure of pageviews takes blogs to places they otherwise never should have gone:
A couple of years ago, I quit blogging for Mashable after they had posted the suicide note to the guy who flew a helicopter into a government building in Texas. Pete’s [the publisher] response to me quitting over the suicide note was, pretty much, “Other blogs were doing it.” He never explained why a Web / Tech / Social Media guide would post a crazy person’s suicide note. “Who wants to say ‘I did it for the page views’ out loud?” 3
This content is attractive to blogs because the traffic it does is both measurable and predictable.
Metrics and measurements are a comfort to publishers. It takes the uncertainty out of their business.
it is incredibly difficult to interpret silence in a constructive way.
The post is correct, well-written information that needs no follow-up commentary. There’s nothing more to say except, “Yeah, what he said.” 2. The post is complete and utter nonsense, and no one wants to waste the energy or bandwidth to even point this out. 3. No one read the post, for whatever reason. 4. No one understood the post but won’t ask for clarification, for whatever reason. 5. No one cares about the post, for whatever reason. 4
silence all means the same thing: no comments, no links, no traffic, no money.
Blogs are so afraid of silence that the flimsiest of evidence can confirm they’re on the right track. You can provide this
publishers don’t care what they say as long as it isn’t bland or ignored.
Professional bloggers understand this dilemma far better than the casual or amateur one,
the paid articles are indisputably better, because they generated more comments and traffic
in the broken world of the web, it is the mark of a professional.
Blogs deliberately do not want to help.
Blogs are not in the business of doing favors
I don’t know if blogs enjoy being tricked. All I know is that they don’t care enough to put a stop to it.
sites don’t have any interest in what they post, as long as it delivers pageviews.
They betray the ethical journalists and earnest readers.
Pageview journalism puffs blogs up and fattens them on a steady diet of guaranteed traffic pullers of a mediocre variety that require little effort to produce.
this metric-driven understanding breaks the news.
Pageview journalism treats people by what they appear to want
publishers throw up their hands as if to say, “We wish people liked better stuff too,” as if they had nothing to do with it.
SOMETIMES I SEE A PREPOSTEROUSLY INACCURATE blog post about a client (or myself) and I take it personally,
