 "TRAFFIC: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral")
TRAFFIC: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral
Author: Ben Smith
Publisher: Penguin Press
Pages: 343
Price: $30
On February 13, 2014, a bored-at-work BuzzFeed quiz ricocheted around the web: “What State Do You Actually Belong In?”
The “actually” seemed to promise a solid, data-driven answer.
But this particular quiz had a bug. Too many people got Wyoming — more than actually lived in Wyoming — and this turn of events was so exciting that people stomped over to Facebook to protest. Then, according to Ben Smith in his engrossing book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, the team at BuzzFeed noticed something that changed media forev —
Well, not forever. This is Ben Smith, after all. Man-about-media, ironist by nature and trade, one-time editor in chief of BuzzFeed News. In unfolding the tale of Gawker, HuffPost and BuzzFeed — the new-media ventures that, he argues, conspired to invent virality — Mr Smith resists the temptation to claim that anything in his experience changed the world forever.
But even as he refuses to canonise his protagonists, Nick Denton (the founder of Gawker Media) and Jonah Peretti (the co-founder of HuffPost and BuzzFeed), they occasionally alight on the odd eureka moment that a more earnest writer could have styled as world-changing.
The Wyoming quiz’s eureka moment belonged to Mr Peretti. When the quiz became BuzzFeed’s most successful post, Mr Peretti, then the company’s chief executive, pinged a Facebook staffer, who explained that the platform had a new algorithm for promoting posts: Facebook was now pushing content that attracted high engagement numbers. A cortisol-spiking post that made hordes of reply guys shriek “Wyoming!”? Facebook blasted it to everyone. Two years later, the same thing would happen with posts that made users shriek “Trump!”
Mr Smith depicts Denton and Peretti as rivals, but they’re not playing precisely the same game. With Gawker, which began in 2002, Mr Denton was seeking to bust up traditional media with blogs that tweaked the high hats in a “faster, truer version of reality.” He mastered “the refresh”; people kept a Gawker tab open all day and compulsively checked for updates.
At HuffPost, which started as The Huffington Post in 2005, and then BuzzFeed, which joined the scene in 2006, Mr Peretti was directing the surges of online influence — traffic — that he had taught himself to manipulate at MIT. He was also trying to determine whether all this traffic should, or could, be pressed into the service of “activism, politics, business or simply fun.”
For years, the site smote its enemies with an energy both sporting and bloodthirsty only to find itself defeated in the 2010s by two formidable forces: The right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, and love. Mr Thiel secretly bankrolled a lawsuit over Gawker’s publication of a celebrity sex tape that pushed the website into bankruptcy. But in Mr Smith’s amused telling, Mr Denton fell in love with Derrence Washington, now his husband. The romance, Mr Smith suggests, dampened his personal spikiness and his taste for unalloyed snark.
Mr Peretti joined Arianna Huffington, Andrew Breitbart and Kenneth Lerer to start The Huffington Post, which was first conceived as a progressive alternative to The Drudge Report. Mr Peretti deployed his wizardry in conjuring traffic to drive a hodgepodge website to box-office glory. It was sold to AOL for $315 million in 2011.
Mr Peretti then jumped to the other company he’d helped start, BuzzFeed, just as Mr Smith took over as editor in chief of BuzzFeed News.
The showdown between BuzzFeed and Gawker is best understood as a contest of attitudes. BuzzFeed in its early years was all Disney princesses, cute pets and toxic positivity, while Gawker had put its chips on tabloid-style exposés and spite. Gawker would sneer, BuzzFeed would coo and the winner would be the post to attract the most clicks, views, likes, shares, comments and, of course, complaints.
Mr Smith finally got his own taste of viral fame in 2017, when he opted to publish the so-called Steele dossier, documenting supposed collusion with Russian agents by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and filled with salacious details about Mr Trump’s escapades in Russia. Mr Smith stands by his decision to publish it. But when its claims were not borne out, he wrung his hands. Can viral political content ever be valuable political content — and vice versa?
Anxiety about this question haunts Mr Smith, and this moral seriousness is what lifts Traffic above other accounts of adventures in start-up land. The most cinematic treachery in Traffic turns out to have been pulled off not by Mr Peretti’s traffic apparatus or by Mr Denton’s cruelty factory, but by the figures who play Igors to their Frankensteins. These include Mr Peretti’s Huffington Post co-founder Breitbart, who went on to create the far-right website Breitbart.com; Benny Johnson, whom Mr Smith hired at BuzzFeed and then fired (for plagiarism), who works for the conservative youth group Turning Point USA; and an alt-right stuntman known as Baked Alaska, who quit BuzzFeed to work as a “tour manager” for the right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos and was convicted of a misdemeanour in the January 6 insurrection.
What did these pioneers of Silicon Alley invent? A way to “measure culture,” Mr Smith writes. He then defines “culture” as “the volume of outrage or the success of a joke.” Indignation and laughter.
This modern conception of culture jostles in my mind alongside Matthew Arnold’s still seductive notion that culture is beauty and intelligence. The jostling feels by turns productive and abrasive.
The reviewer writes features for Wired. ©2023 The New York Times News Service
The reviewer writes features for Wired. ©2023 The New York Times News Service
