by Ryan Holiday
Yet the media and the public, aware of the potential implications of airing video of his act, began to push back. Many decided they would not air such a video. Some five hundred people attended a protest in Kabul where they burned Jones in effigy. At the last second Jones, under pressure, backed down, and the crisis was averted.
But Terry Jones was back a few months later, announcing for the second time that he planned to burn the Koran. Each blog and outlet that covered the lead-up to the burning made the story—and the media monster that was Terry Jones—that much bolder and bigger. Reporters asked if a direct request from President Obama would stop him, which of course meant that the president of the United States of America would have to negotiate with a homegrown terrorist (he traded up the chain to the most powerful man in the world).
This circus was what finally pushed Jones over the edge. In March 2011, he went through with the burning, despite the threatened media blackout.
He called their bluff and it worked. The blackout fell apart when a college student named Andrew Ford, freelancing for the wire service Agence France-Presse, took advantage of a story too dirty and dangerous for many journalists to touch in good conscience.*
Agence France-Presse, Ford’s publisher, is syndicated on Google and Yahoo! News. They immediately republished his article. The story began to go up the chain, getting bigger and bigger. Roughly thirty larger blogs and online news services had picked up Ford’s piece or linked to it in the first day. It made the story too big for the rest of the media—including the foreign press—to continue to resist. So the news of Jones’s Koran burning, a calculated stunt to extract attention from a system that could not prevent itself from being exploited, became known to the world. And it was a deadly monster of a story.
Within days, twenty-seven people were killed during riots in Afghanistan, including seven UN workers; forty more were injured. Christians were specifically targeted, and Taliban flags were flown in the streets of Kabul. “It took just one college student to defeat a media blackout and move a story halfway around the globe within twenty-four hours,” the Poynter Institute wrote in an analysis of the reporting. This was, as Forbes journalist Jeff Bercovici put it, truly an example of “when Journalism 2.0 kills.”8
One kook and one overeager young journalist unintentionally show why trading up the chain—feeding the monster—can be so dangerous (though for Jones, very effective). They weren’t just turning nothing into something. The beast these blogs built up set off needless bloodshed.
And is this not a similar dynamic to what happened in Berkeley in 2017 when students rioted in protest of the notorious troll Milo Yiannopoulos? Somehow a rumor started that Milo would be outing undocumented immigrants during his talk on the UC Berkeley campus. I have seen no definitive proof behind this rumor—nor could there ever be proof that someone might have done something. We’ll never know because the riots and protesting became so violent that his talk was canceled. People easily could have been hurt or killed. Worse, the protesters didn’t realize that they were playing right into Milo’s hands. What would have otherwise been a talk in front of a few hundred students became headlines across the country for several days. President Trump even weighed in—threatening to pull federal funding from the university. Once again, a troll won and was rewarded with precisely the attention he wanted because no one in the media could break their own self-imposed pattern. The stories just took on a life of their own.
You can trade up the chain for charity or you can trade up it to create funny fake news—or you can do it to create violence, hatred, and, even incidentally, death.
*Proving this theory unnervingly correct, Newsweek picked up Lindsay’s advice from her tiny personal blog and reposted it on the official Newsweek Tumblr.
*It’s been more than five years since this happened. I included it in the first and second editions of the book, I’ve told the story on NPR’s On the Media and dozens of other outlets, and as of this writing, that story on Curbed.com (owned by Vox Media) is still there and still uncorrected.
*In fact, a few years later a writer on one of the sites we exploited repeatedly while promoting the movie wrote a post titled: “Are Traditional News Media Stealing Scoops from Bloggers?” which accused the Chicago Tribune of stealing article ideas from her blog Chicago Now. She was right, they were stealing, and that’s exactly how we got coverage into the editorial page of the Tribune.
*This was excellently caught and detailed by Quickish in their post “ ‘Brett Favre on Dancing with the Stars?’ No. Not Even a Rumor”; their research was promptly stolen and reposted by the oft-guilty Deadspin for an easy twenty-five thousand pageviews.
*This happens in politics all the time. As Democratic consultant Christian Grantham told Forbes, “Campaigns understand that there are some stories that regular reporters won’t print. So they’ll give those stories to the blogs.”
III
THE BLOG CON
HOW PUBLISHERS MAKE MONEY ONLINE
Media companies can very much be in a race against time for growth. Investors want a return on their money and, given the economics of web news, that almost always requires exponential growth in uniques and pageviews.
—RYAN MCCARTHY, REUTERS
Picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates.
—TIM RUTTEN, LOS ANGELES TIMES, ON THE HUFFINGTON POST BUSINESS MODEL
ST R IPPED BA R E, THE ECONOMICS OF ONLINE news—the way blogging really works—is a shocking thing. I’ve never needed to blog for my daily bread, to generate pageviews to pay my rent, but as a press agent, a media buyer, and later a consultant to media companies, I know how this system works. I won’t say it is as disturbing as watching slaughterhouse videos or an exposé of a sweatshop, but it will turn your stomach to learn how online media outlets like the Huffington Post and even the website of the New York Times make their money, and how much money they actually make.
This matters, because as businesses designed to make money, the way in which they do business is the main filter for how they do the news. Every story they produce must contort itself to fit this mold—whatever the topic or subject. I will show you this by explaining exactly how I have exploited these economics for my own personal gain. You’re free to view these lessons as opportunities or as loopholes that must be closed. I see them as both.
TRAFFIC IS MONEY
On the face of it, blogs make their money from selling advertisements. These advertisements are paid for by the impression (generally a rate per thousand impressions). A site might have several ad units on each page; the publisher’s revenue equals the cumulative CPM (cost per thousand) multiplied by the number of pageviews. Advertisement × Traffic = Revenue. An ad buyer like me buys this space by the millions—ten million impressions on this site, five million on another, fifty million through a network. A few blogs produce a portion of their revenue through selling extras—hosting conferences or affiliate deals—but, for the most part, this is the business: Traffic is money.
A portion of the advertising on blogs is sold directly by the publisher, a portion is sold by sales reps who work on commission, and the rest is sold by advertising networks that specialize in the remaining inventory, often in a real-time bidding system. Regardless of who sells it or who buys it, what matters is that every ad impression on a site is monetized, if only for fractions of a penny. Each and every pageview is money in the pocket of the publisher.
Publishers and advertisers can’t differentiate between the types of impressions an ad does on a site. A perusing reader is no better than an accidental reader. An article that provides worthwhile advice is no more valuable than one instantly forgotten. So long as the page loads and the ads are seen, both sides are fulfilling their purpose. A click is a click.
Knowing this, blogs do everything they can to increase the latter variable in the equation (traffic, pageviews). It’s how you must understand them as a business. Every decision a publisher makes is ruled by one dictum: Traffic by any m
eans.
Scoops Are Traffic
One of the biggest shocks to the online world was the launch of TMZ. The blog was developed by AOL in 2005, and revenues skyrocketed to nearly $20 million a year almost immediately, paving the way for its now famous television program. This was all accomplished through a handful of major scoops. Or at least, TMZ’s special definition of “scoops.”
The blog’s founder, Harvey Levin, once said in an interview that TMZ is “a serious news operation that has the same rigid standards that any news operation in America has.” This is the same site that once published, at 4:07 a.m., an exclusive scoop: a blurry, never-before-seen photo of future president John F. Kennedy on a boat filled with naked women. This “exclusive” scoop was headlined the jfk photo that could have changed history. Only it couldn’t have altered world events for one simple reason: The man in the photo wasn’t JFK. In fact, it turned out to be a spread from a 1967 issue of Playboy.1 Oops!
Despite missteps like this, TMZ turned scoop-getting into a science. They broke the story of Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic outbursts during his DUI arrest. And then they got video of Michael Rich-ards’s racist onstage meltdown, posted the bruised-Rihanna police photo, and announced the news of Michael Jackson’s death. TMZ originated four of the biggest stories to come from the internet and captured a substantial audience from these enormous surges of traffic.* They didn’t always use the most reputable or reliable means of getting their scoops, but nevertheless, today when people think celebrity news, they think of TMZ. (They don’t think of Defamer, Gawker’s predecessor to TMZ, which was shuttered because it couldn’t deliver any scoops, and they don’t like Perez Hilton’s silly little drawings anymore either.)
It sent a very clear message to publishers: Exclusives build blogs. Scoops equal traffic.
The thing is, exclusive scoops are rare, and at the very least, they require some effort to obtain. So greedy blogs have perfected what is called the “pseudo-exclusive.” In a private memo to his employees, Nick Denton, founder of the Gawker Media blog empire, asked the writers to use this technique, because it allows them “to take ownership of a story even if it isn’t a strict exclusive.”2 In other words, pretend they have a scoop. The strategy works well, because many readers will see the story in only one place; they have no idea that it was actually broken or originally reported elsewhere.
One of Gawker’s biggest scoops early on in the race—certainly a TMZ-level story—was a collection of Tom Cruise Scientology videos. It is a good example of a pseudo-exclusive, since the work wasn’t done by the site who eventually got all the pageviews from it. Since I witnessed the story unfold behind the scenes, I know that the tapes were actually unearthed by Holly wood journalist Mark Ebner, whose blog I was advising at the time. Ebner called me, very excited with news of a potentially huge scoop, and said that he’d bring over the materials. A few hours later, he gave me some DVDs in an envelope marked “confidential,” which I watched later that night with a friend. Our stupid reaction: “Tom Cruise being crazy; how is that new?”
Gawker had a different reaction. See, Ebner had also shown the clips to his friends at Gawker, who turned around and immediately posted a story featuring the videos before Mark or anyone else had a chance to. I don’t know whether Gawker promised Mark they’d give him credit. All I know is that what happened was shitty: Their post went on to do 3.2 million views and bring their site a whole new audience. Mark received nothing, because Gawker didn’t link back to his site—which would have been the right thing to do. By doing this, Gawker owned a story that was not theirs. Only after that did I begin to understand how blog fortunes were made: off the backs of others.
When all it takes is one story to propel a blog from the dredges of the internet to mainstream notoriety, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that sites will do anything to get their shot, even if it means manufacturing or stealing scoops (and deceiving readers and advertisers in the process).
Established press doesn’t have this problem. They aren’t anxious for name recognition, because they already have it. Instead of bending the rules (and the truth) to get it, their main concern for their business model is to protect their reputations. This is a critical difference. Media was once about protecting a name; on the web it is about building one.
THE BLOG CON: NAMES, SCOOPS, AND TRAFFIC CREATE AN EXIT
I’ve written about how sites engage in an endless chase for revenue through pageviews, and that is what they do. However, blogs are not intended to be profitable and independent businesses. The tools they use to build traffic and revenue are part of a larger play.
Blogs are built to be sold. Though they make substantial revenues from advertising, the real money is in selling the entire site to a larger company for a multiple of the traffic and earnings. Usually to a rich sucker.
Weblogs, Inc. was sold to AOL for $25 million. The Huffington Post was sold to AOL for $315 million in cash, with its owner, Ari-anna Huffington, deliberately eschewing the opportunity to wait and build for an IPO. TechCrunch was also sold to AOL for $30 million. Discovery bought the blog TreeHugger for $10 million. Ars Technica was sold to Condé Nast for more than $20 million. Know Your Meme was acquired by Cheezburger Media for seven figures. FOX Sports Interactive purchased the sports blog network Yard-barker. I worked on an acquisition like this myself when the Collective, a talent management company I advise, bought Bloody Disgusting, a blog about horror films, with an eye on potentially selling it to someone bigger down the line. The site ViralNova was purchased for a reported $100 million, and EliteDaily.com sold for $50 million. HelloGiggles, a pop culture blog, was acquired for millions as well.
Blogs are built and run with an exit in mind. This is really why they need scoops and acquire marquee bloggers—to build up their names for investors and to show a trend of rapidly increasing traffic. The pressure for this traffic in a short period of time is intense. And desperation, as a media manipulator knows, is the greatest quality you can hope for in a potential victim. Each blog is its own mini-Ponzi scheme, for which traffic growth is more important than solid financials, brand recognition more important than trust, and scale more important than business sense. Blogs are built so someone else will want them—one stupid buyer cashing out the previous ones—and millions of dollars are exchanged for essentially worthless assets.
ANYTHING GOES IN THE DEN OF THIEVES
It doesn’t surprise me at all that shady business deals and conflicts of interest abound in this world. My favorite example, of course, is myself. I am regularly the online ad buyer and the publicist or PR contact for the clients I represent. So the same sites that snarkily cover my companies also depend on me for large six-or even seven-figure checks each year. On the same day a writer for a blog might be e-mailing me for information about a rumor they heard, their publisher is calling me on the phone asking if I want to increase the size of my ad buy. Later in this book I’ll write about how difficult it is to get bloggers to correct even blatantly inaccurate stories—this conflict of interest was one of the only effective tools I could use to combat that. Naturally, nobody minded what I was doing, because they were too busy lining their own pockets to care.
Michael Arrington, the loudmouth founder and former editor in chief of TechCrunch, is famous for investing in the start-ups that his blogs would then cover. Although he no longer runs TechCrunch, he was a partner in two investment funds during his tenure and now manages his own, CrunchFund. In other words, even when he is not a direct investor, he has connections or interests in dozens of companies on his beat, and his insider knowledge helps turn profits for the firm.
When criticized for these conflicts, he responded by saying that his competitors were simply jealous because he was—I’m not kidding—“a lot better than them.”* So when Arrington blew the lid off a secret meeting of angel investors in Silicon Valley in 2011—later known as “Angelgate”—it’s hard to say whose interests he was serving, his readers’ or his own. Or maybe he was upset not becaus
e collusion is wrong but because the group had declined to invite him and—again, not kidding—treated him rudely when he showed up anyway. He ultimately left TechCrunch after a highly publicized fight with the new owners, AOL, who dared to question this conflict of interest.
Nick Denton of Gawker is also a prolific investor in his own space, often putting money into companies founded by employees who left his company or were fired. He has stakes in several local blog networks, such as Curbed, that are often linked to or written about on his larger sites. By shuffling users around to two sites he can charge advertisers twice. Denton also invested in the site Cityfile, which he was able to pump up with traffic from his other blogs before acquiring it outright and rolling it back into Gawker
Influence is ultimately the goal of most blogs and blog publishers, because that influence can be sold to a larger media company. But, as Arrington and Denton show, influence can also be abused for profit through strategic investments—be it in the companies they write about or where they decide to send monetizable traffic. And, of course, these are only the conflicts of interest blatant enough to be discovered by the public. Who knows what else goes on behind the curtain?
It’s also interesting to note that many of these blogs and publishing platforms, which purport to expose corruption and the mis-deeds of other businesses, often have their own dark secrets. As one former VentureBeat blogger, Bekah Grant, recently confessed on Medium, the job was a relentless, rapid machine that had to be constantly fed. “I wrote an average of 5 posts a day,” she said, “churning out nearly 1,740 articles over the course of 20 months. That is, by all objective standards, insane.” “Insane” is one word. “Exploitative” is probably a better one. I remember seeing an ad a few years ago for a Washington Post blogging gig that required at least twelve posts a day. And this is the same organization tasked with holding other businesses and public figures accountable for labor practices? We’re supposed to listen to them as they hold Uber’s feet to the fire?