Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral

by Ben Smith

But traffic, Jonah was among the first to discover, wasn’t merely mechanical. Traffic was human emotion, human psychology, desire and curiosity and humor. It

He saw a commercial future in news aggregation and distribution, and had written a memo for his bosses at the FT pushing for what was then a revolutionary tactic: linking to competing publications when their stories were better. One

Nick and Jonah approached the new internet from opposite directions. Jonah was obsessed with how to make a single idea—often, a single joke—travel, regardless of its content or the identity of the person who originated it. Nick had the inverse obsession: he wanted people coming back again and again to his blog. The reader he imagined was a gadget-head, bored at work, refreshing Gizmodo. That meant starting early and posting all day, ensuring that your audience would have something new every time they hit refresh.

That technical trick drove Tumblr’s success, and was copied by other social networks—Facebook’s share, Twitter’s retweet. It would become the basic mechanism for a generation of amplifying everything from clever jokes to lies about elections.

“politics is kind of stupid, and everyone should know that.”

Advertisers were allergic to politics, it turned out—an old problem for hard news that would only intensify online.

Obama and Trump, The Huffington Post and breitbart.com—it’s hard to imagine that they’d have much in common. Yet both movements were rooted, in part, in the new way of thinking about people that came when you saw them as traffic—measuring interest and intent, and channeling it into action. So perhaps it’s not so surprising that Jonah Peretti and Andrew Breitbart worked out of the same office for a couple of months in 2005.

Because while Jonah had spent his time thinking about how to make an idea spread, Nick and Drudge were the masters of something else: how to make a website “sticky.” They were masters of the refresh.

Huffington liked to hire big-name Washington journalists who would promote her site on television and at Georgetown dinner parties, figures like Newsweek’s Howard Fineman. They showed a benign interest in Jonah’s increasingly frantic scramble for traffic, but wrote the same stories they’d always been writing. They cared who was reading, not how many. They measured themselves by the old standards of journalism: power, relevance, impact.

If you read Jonah’s posts, you’d think he was a crazy person, or an idiot. But he wasn’t either; he was simply immune to embarrassment, throwing internet spaghetti at the wall, waiting to see what would stick. He wasn’t concerned with taste or quality or brand or consistency. He just wanted to know what would get traffic.

And the strategy of drawing traffic from search engines rather than from the home page had an additional advantage. KT was always afraid she’d receive a call from Arianna or Kenny telling her to dial it back. Her discovery that Huffington Post readers would click on the term “sideboob” and hang out on a page full of stories with the word, for instance, was not the sort of thing they wanted associated with their names. But with the new link tool, if she and Jonah did it right, they’d get a million views to a post that never showed up on Huffington Post’s home page, and so never risking embarrassing Arianna or Kenny.

retrospect, it was a new kind of cultural politics that would reshape America when social media really

(If you squint at 2007 Jezebel, you can see 2020s Twitter more clearly than anywhere else on the internet of that era.)

This was, needless to say, not exactly what Nick had in mind for girly Gawker. He asked Anna from time to time whether “you really need to do so many posts about periods or abortion or rape. Why don’t you do some about makeup?” She mostly ignored him. “I was aware of the fact that he wasn’t thrilled, but here’s the thing—we had great traffic,” she said. By August 2007, they had five hundred thousand page views a month; by the next March, they were at over a million. Holmes couldn’t help gloating when their numbers surpassed Gawker’s. And Nick didn’t really mind. He’d learned that his editors needed to rebel against the man, and that he was the man. “A lot of it was theater—wasn’t it?” he asked, years later. Anyway, he reflected, “It’s pretty natural and obvious that you set up an online women’s magazine for a new generation and it’s going to go—it was predestined to go—in a more political, more feminist direction.” And Nick loved success and relevance even more than he loved money; Batty knew he’d never win a fight with Anna as long as the site was a hit.

Jezebel had a community, a real one. The

A generation of women who worked at Jezebel, and who read it, would reshape journalism, too, bringing a feminist vantage point to news organizations and television writers’ rooms, and they’d build the groundwork for what would become the #MeToo movement a decade later. On Jezebel, too, were the earliest stirrings of new online identity politics that would, a decade later, dominate social media. The bloggers’ fury at the media’s two-dimensional, virtually all-white portraits of American women would migrate from the blog and its comments section onto Twitter, which

Obama chose a good time. His staff was talking to Hughes right around the moment that Facebook made a monumental shift, opening its platform to anyone over thirteen years of age with a valid email address. The platform went from just twelve million monthly active users in 2006 to fifty million in 2007. Hughes helped Obama’s staff add information about his favorite musicians, including Stevie Wonder, and his top movies (Casablanca, The Godfather I and II), to his official profile. A breathless Wall Street Journal article on Hughes’s effort, headlined “BO, U R So Gr8,” noted that the page immediately caught the attention of college students, one of whom posted the first message to the page: “Run for president! Save us!”

Mybarackobama.com allowed Obama supporters to create accounts and pages, organize events, and raise money. Its users were active—they organized more than two hundred thousand events for the Illinois senator. Its power to move people from the internet to the ballot box stunned even Obama’s aides, who would arrive in obscure states to find that volunteers had already created a campaign apparatus—places like Idaho, where Kassie Cerami, a local woman who’d been working in marketing, quit her job, found one other Obama supporter online, and threw her life into the campaign. Facebook’s executives were watching their platform expand in all directions, and it was certainly cool to see America’s political leaders coming to visit their young audience. They saw flickers of an uncontrollable new future, just as Anna and her team at Jezebel had. But what inspired the execs, what really gave them the sense not just that their platform would make them billions and change life for American college kids, but that Facebook could change the world, was happening two thousand miles south of Washington, DC. Social media politics as we know them in the early 2020s didn’t begin in SoHo or Chicago or Washington, but in Barranquilla, Colombia, where, on January 3, 2008, a young civil engineer read news of the latest developments in a high-profile kidnapping.

The power of the new social media politics was intoxicating to Obama’s supporters, and to Facebook’s executives in Palo Alto. It seemed also to coalesce around people like them—educated young folks with progressive social values. Few considered at the time that the tools were malleable, and that young progressives just happened to be the ones on the internet in 2008. As the year went on, Facebook executives grew thirstier for this stream of political energy. The company’s leaders could also see that tiny Twitter had begun to channel it, tapping into the immediacy of breaking news and of social movements to grip the attention of users and the media alike. Twitter was growing so fast, Zuckerberg observed, that if it kept going at the same rate, it would soon surpass Facebook as the largest of the social networks.

Working for him was more like being managed by the oracle at Delphi: he’d make an observation, sometimes a cryptic one, about the future of the internet, and his staff would try to figure out what he

“I’m a dick to u bc of social mirroring,” Jonah fired back.

The idea was that just as cable networks had provided the channels on which new media giants like CNN and MTV’s parent Viacom could sell content and reach audiences, so the new digital networks—from YouTube to Facebook—would one day be sources of revenue for a new generation of media companies. Back then, it seemed insane to imagine you’d make a living on those platforms—much less build a company on them. But Jonah had seen around a corner.

The story they saw was of the inexorable rise of progressive youth movements, powered by new technology, behind a new generation of leaders like the young American president. The giant platforms—Facebook first of all—were run by people who thrilled at the hopeful popular movements, from the One Million Voices Against FARC in Colombia to Barack Obama’s campaign, that their technology helped spawn. Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and the rest never quite grasped that there were people disgusted with the founders’ new power. They’d never really considered that these same tools could be used against them. And what did they all think of Andrew

“Tracking traffic makes everyone cynical,”

Dick-era Gawker was not solely about literal dicks. This was a broad assault on the idea of privacy—and, in particular, on people who Nick thought were hypocrites when it came to their personal privacy.

boasted that “the victory that has its most obvious roots in our reporting” was the temporary replacement of Weiner by a Republican, Bob Turner. These were pretty small political stakes: Turner was an obscure one-term congressman; Democrats quickly retook the New York City district. But Breitbart’s real victory, Andrew felt, wasn’t over Democrats. “We had beaten the media again.” That was where Breitbart was different. BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, and Gawker all, in their way, sought to replace—or improve—the old media. That’s what they told their investors. That’s where the money and attention were, after all. Andrew was up to something different: sustained attacks on what he viewed as an undifferentiated “Democrat-media complex.”

Like many a great salesperson, he seemed to be able to convince himself of pretty much anything as well.

Arianna and Kenny had taken some steps to obscure their sources of traffic. At the end of 2009, editors had received a memo banning nudity from the site’s front page. “They are KNEECAPPING our traffic,” one immediately complained to Breanna in an email; she scrambled to mitigate the problem, suggesting a new option that would display salacious posts on every other page of the site, just not the front.

What was happening on Twitter often felt more real than the person in front of me.

Then I went to check the page: it was nearly illegible, the lines almost on top of each other. BuzzFeed had never before published a full paragraph. While I panicked, Johanesen tweaked the code; by morning, BuzzFeed was safe for words. And while the words my little team and I wrote then were mostly pretty forgettable—how much do you want to hear about the most boring presidential campaign in living memory, starring Mitt Romney?—the wind was at our back.

We set out to be the news organization of record for the new social web. We treated Twitter, not our own website, as our front page. We drove all our energy into breaking stories that would spread on that platform, not worrying about our own home page.

After the 2008 election, he had stopped running MoveOn to write a book, The Filter Bubble, where he warned presciently that the subtle personalization pioneered by Facebook and other platforms would “serve up a kind of invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar and leaving us oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark territory of the unknown.”

BuzzFeed’s editors had learned through trial and error that social media was organized in large part around identities. Write compellingly about what it was like to be born in the 1990s, or to be an Iranian from New Jersey, or a Catholic girl, or to grow up with East Asian parents, and thousands of people would share the post with the magic words “this is me.” Their friends would click for a glimpse of insight. The traffic was guaranteed, and the posts extended BuzzFeed’s tendrils into new territories.

Politics has always been in large part bullshit, salesmanship, flimflam, aesthetics.

What we found wasn’t so much malicious as lazy, a matter of copying and pasting from Wikipedia merely to save time in producing content that, unlike much of BuzzFeed, had crossed the hazy line into news and so was being held to a higher standard. We reviewed and corrected more than forty instances of plagiarism, adding an apologetic statement to each article. Benny wasn’t answering the phone, so John Stanton headed out into the Washington night to try to find him and fire him in person.

The thirst for attention, the willingness to say absolutely anything to go viral, and the attraction to uniforms and rituals of power. Benny kicked around in the media industry awhile longer, getting fired for allegedly being lazy or erratic or for taking credit for others’ work.

Do you know how many lame rich guys there are, and how few people who really build something?

why all those people who were definitely, certainly not moving to Wyoming had added up to the most successful post in BuzzFeed’s history so far.

1 comment = 4 likes. The company’s algorithm had shifted to prioritize “engagement,” rather than giving a simple thumbs-up.

metrics based on how much people were sharing, clicking, and talking about a piece of content; and an algorithm that promoted the pieces that drew that engagement—not just to engaged individuals’ friends, but to everyone on the vast network. The details would change over time, but the formula wouldn’t—and a new global wave of engaging right-wing politicians would be ready for it.

Most media CEOs viewed Facebook with incomprehension, or anger. It had built a better advertising product than they ever had, and ripped their core business out from under them. Then when they tried to talk to Zuckerberg, they met a robot who was half-idealism, half–naked ambition—and who didn’t seem to speak their language, of news and civic virtue, at all. That’s part of why Zuckerberg and his team liked Jonah.

What was going on, it emerged, was the last, greatest, totally harmless moment of global internet culture. The Dress was divisive, in the purest sense, dividing (according to a BuzzFeed poll with nearly four million votes) the two thirds of people who saw white and gold from the third who saw blue and black. Facebook’s engineers had been perfecting its engagement metrics since the debate, a year earlier, over who was destined to move to Wyoming.

“How often do you think things should go viral like the Dress?” Mosseri asked. Jonah was surprised by the question—and by the idea that the frequency of things going viral was up to Mosseri’s team. The conversation made clear to Jonah that Facebook was worried about something new: losing control. To them, the Dress hadn’t been a goofy triumph: it had been a kind of a bug, something that scared them. The Dress itself was harmless, but the next meme to colonize the entire platform within minutes might not be, and this one had moved too fast for the team in Menlo Park to control.

realization: it marked the beginning of a decade in which Facebook would start to realize its own power and try to control it, even if the company’s efforts always seemed to be too little, too late.

In Mosseri’s worried tone, Jonah detected the same threat of censorship. And he saw more clearly than most that the alternative to a wide-open viral internet wasn’t necessarily a return to the placid old media world. It would be an algorithm that recommended content to individuals according to a narrower set of guidelines.

But that was also the year Nick, for the first time, seemed to truly lose his edge. The problem was that Nick was happy. Nick was getting married.

They are succeeding because of—in order—a killer social strategy, successful search optimization and community building, and a shift towards a more expansive view of the role of a journalist as a public expert.”

What we’d missed was a cliché: culture eats strategy for breakfast. Arthur Sulzberger

persuaded New York Times editors that the internet also could aspire to the Times’ core goal, top-quality journalism. The report’s leak—and the fact that the heir apparent had been leading it—finally sent the kind of political and cultural signal that it takes to shift a giant institution.

But it was the last moment in which the direction of history seemed clear. That fall, it would become evident that BuzzFeed had begun to crash into the ceiling of the advertising business that was left for publishers after Google and Facebook swallowed most of the business. Jonah would, for the first time, hear his own board push him to cut costs, and resist that suggestion. And just six days after that friendly gathering on Eighth Avenue, and about a mile north, Donald Trump would descend the golden escalator into national politics, American liberals would become desperate to understand what was happening, and the machine Perpich and his colleagues had just built to sell them subscriptions would kick into high gear. The Times would master the internet, and be transformed by it, while, in a new cultural moment, BuzzFeed struggled to find its place and Gawker collapsed.