by Ryan Holiday
In a retrospective of his last ten years of blogging, publisher Om Malik of Gigaom bragged that he’d written over eleven thousand posts and two million words in the last decade. Which, while translating into three posts a day, means the average post was just 215 words long. But that’s nothing compared to the ideal Gawker item. Nick Denton told a potential hire in 2008 that it was “one hundred words long. Two hundred, max. Any good idea,” he said, “can be expressed at that length.”2
Preposterously faulty intuition like this can be seen across the web, on blogs and sites of all types. The pressure to keep content visually appealing and ready for impulse readers is a constant suppressant on length, regardless of what is cut to make it happen. In a University of Kentucky study of blogs about cancer, researchers found that a full 80 percent of the blog posts they analyzed contained fewer than five hundred words.3 The average number of words per post was 335, short enough to make the articles on the Huffington Post seem like lengthy manuscripts. I don’t care what Nick Denton says; I’m pretty sure that the complexities of cancer can’t be properly expressed in 100 words. Or 200, or 335, or 500, for that matter.
Even the most skilled writer would have trouble conveying the side effects of chemotherapy or how to discuss the possibility of death with your children in just a handful of words. Yet here they are—the majority of posts barely filling three pages, double spaced, in a twelve-point font. They wouldn’t even take three minutes to read.
More recently, one of Politico’s cofounders, Jim VandeHei, launched a new site called Axios, which is in part a reaction to his belief that much of today’s journalism is too long. “People don’t want the pieces we’re writing,” he told Recode. “They’re too damn long.” I don’t know what internet this guy has been hanging out on, but I can’t say I am often struck when reading that the piece was just too in depth and too well researched. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever had that reaction.
Of course, it’s not completely the bloggers’ fault. People are busy, and computers are fraught with distraction. It would be crazy to think that entrepreneurs wouldn’t adapt their content around these facts. The average time users spend on a site like Jezebel is a little over a minute. On the technology and personal efficiency blog Life-hacker, they can average less than ten seconds. The common wisdom is that the site has one second to make the hook. One second. The bounce rate on blogs (or the percentage of people who leave the site immediately, without clicking anything) is incredibly high. Analysis of news sites has the average bounce rate pushing well north of 50 percent. When the statistics show a medium to be so fickle that half the audience starts leaving as soon as they get there, there is no question that this dynamic is going to seriously impact content choices.
Studies that have tracked the eye movements of people browsing the web show the same fickleness. The biggest draw of eyeballs is the headline, of which viewers usually see only the first few words before moving on. After users break off from the headline, their glance tends to descend downward along the left-hand column, scanning for sentences that catch their attention. If nothing does, they leave. What slows this dismissive descent is the form of the article—small, short paragraphs (one to two sentences versus three to five) seem to encourage slightly higher reading rates, as does a boldface introduction or subheadline (occasionally called a deck). What blogger is going to decide they’re above gimmicks such as bulleted lists when it’s precisely those gimmicks that seem to keep readers on the page for a few priceless seconds longer?
Jakob Nielsen, the reigning guru of web usability, according to Fortune magazine, and the author of twelve books on the subject, advises sites to follow a simple rule: 40 percent of every article must be cut.4 But despair not, because according to his calculations, when chopped thus, the average article loses only 30 percent of its value. Oh, only 30 percent! It’s the kind of math publishers go through every day. As long as the equation works out in their favor, it’s worth doing. What does it matter if the readers get stuck with the losses?
Once at a lunch meeting with an editor of Racked NY, a blog about retail shopping in New York City, the incredibly influential blogger told me that she did all her shopping online. “So you wear our clothes but you never go in our stores?” I asked, since she was wearing American Apparel at the meeting. “I just don’t have time to go shopping anymore.” There was a store within blocks of her office and two others on her way home. This was literally her beat. I guess it doesn’t matter anyway; where would she put personal observations in a two-hundred-word post even if she had them?
I once watched as an editor at the site Mediagazer tried to do her fact-checking for a story about me by simply tweeting out into the universe. After watching her hilarious attempts to “verify [my] credibility” by asking people I’d never worked with and never met, I finally logged onto Twitter to send my first message in years: “@ LyraMckee Have you thought about emailing me? [email protected].”
Why would she? Though I’d actually be able to answer her questions, tweeting out loud was easier than e-mailing me, and it meant she didn’t have to wait for my response. Plus, I’m boring and would have rained all over her speculation parade.
When Nielsen talks about cutting 40 percent of an article, actually knowing anything about what they’re talking about is what bloggers leave on the cutting-room floor. As a manipulator, that’s fine with me. It makes it easier to spin or even to lie. It’s not like I have to worry about their verifying it. They don’t have time for anything like that. A writer has minimums they must hit, and chasing a story that won’t make it on the site is an expensive error. So it’s not surprising that bloggers stick to eight-hundred-or-fewer-word posts about stories they know will generate traffic.
Jack Fuller, a former editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, once admonished a group of newspaper editors by saying, “I don’t know about your world, but the one I live in does not shape itself so conveniently to anybody’s platform.”5 For bloggers it would be nice if life were all exciting headlines and a clean eight hundred words, and happened to self-organize all its juicy bits down the left-hand column. The world is far too messy, too nuanced and complicated, and frankly far less exciting for that to be the case. Only a fool addicted to his laptop would fail to see that the material demanded by the constraints of their medium and the material reality gives them rarely match.
On the other hand, as a marketer I quite like these fools.
CHECK FOR THE KEY UNDER THE MAT
Most common question I hear from people trying to market stuff: How do I pitch blogs? Um, no need to ask me; the blogs straight up tell you. Every few months blogs trot out the tired old story of how to pitch coverage to them. They advise publicists to do a better job e-mailing the blogger and assuaging their ego if they want the blogger to write about their clients. From a reader’s perspective this is all rather strange. Why is the blog revealing how it can be manipulated? In turn, why do we not head for the hills when it is clear that blogs pass this manipulation on to us?
Some favorite headlines:
Rules of Thumb for Pitching Silly Claims to TechCrunch (TechCrunch)
How Not to Pitch a Blogger, #648 (ReadWriteWeb)
DEAR PR FOLKS: Please Stop Sending Us “Experts” and “Story Ideas”—Here’s What to Send Us Instead (Business Insider)
A Private Note to PR People (Scobleizer)
How to Pitch a Blogger (as in, Brazen Careerist, the blogger writing it)
The Do’s and Don’ts of Online Publicity, for Some Reason (Lindsay Robertson, Jezebel, NYMag, Huffington Post)
The unintended consequence of that kind of coverage is that it is essentially a manual with step-by-step instructions on how to infiltrate and deceive that blogger with marketing. I used to be thankful when I’d see that; now I just wonder: Why are you doing this to yourselves?
MAKING LEMONADE
Let’s just say Fuller’s advice does not have a wide following online, particularly his reminder that repo
rters owe a “duty to reality, not to platforms.”
In fact, bloggers believe the opposite. And that sucks for everyone—except marketers. Because once you understand the limitations of the platform, the constraints can be used against the people who depend on it. The technology can be turned on itself.
I remember promoting one author whose book had just spent five weeks on the New York Times bestseller list (meaning people were willing to pay for it in one medium). When I was trying to post material from the book on various popular blogs, it became clear that it was just too long. So we got rid of the thoroughness and the supporting arguments and reduced it down to the most basic, provocative parts. One chapter—the same chapter people enjoyed fully in book form—had to be split up into eight separate posts. To get attention we had to cut it up into itty-bitty bites and spoon-feed it to readers and bloggers like babies.
If a blogger isn’t willing or doesn’t have the time to get off their ass to visit the stores they write about, that’s their problem. It makes it that much easier to create my own version of reality. I will come to them with the story. I’ll meet them on their terms, but their story will be filled with my terms. They won’t take the time or show the interest to check with anyone else.
Blogs must—economically and structurally—distort the news in order for the format to work. As businesses, blogs can see the world through no other lens. The format is the problem. Or the perfect opportunity, depending on how you look at it.
XII
TACTIC #9
JUST MAKE STUFF UP (EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING IT)
Those who have gone through the high school of reporterdom have acquired a new instinct by which they see and hear only that which can create a sensation, and accordingly their report becomes not only a careless one, but hopelessly distorted.
—HUGO MUNSTERBERG, “THE CASE OF THE REPORTER,” MCCLURE’S, 1911
THE WORLD IS BORING, BUT THE NEWS IS EXCITING. It’s a paradox of modern life. Journalists and bloggers are not magicians, but if you consider the material they’ve got to work with and the final product they crank out day in and day out, you must give them some credit. Shit becomes sugar.
If there is one special skill that journalists can claim, it is the ability to find the angle on any story. That the news is ever chosen over entertainment in the fight for attention is a testament to their skill. High-profile bloggers rightly take great pride in this ability. This pride and this pressure are what we media manipulators use against them. Pride goeth before the fall.
No matter how dull, mundane, or complex a topic may be, a good reporter must find the angle. Bloggers, descended from these journalists, have to take it to an entirely new level. They need to find not only the angle but the click-driving headline, an eye-catching image; generate comments and links; and in some cases, squeeze in some snark. And they have to do it up to a dozen times a day without the help of an editor. They can smell the angle of a story like a shark smells blood in the water. Because the better the angle, the more the blogger gets paid. Technology and big data have exacerbated this process too, finding meaningless correlations and anomalies to make hay out of. (I just heard an anchor on SportsCenter report, in all seriousness, that a hit was the “fifth-longest Cubs home run since 2009.” C’mon.)
As Drew Curtis of Fark.com says, “Problems occur when the journalist has to find an angle on a story that doesn’t have one.” A few years before Drew (in 1899, to be exact) the Washington Post reported:
The New York Times has such abnormal keenness of vision that it is occasionally able to see that which does not exist. The ardency of its desire sometimes overcomes the coolness of its reasons, so that the thing it wants to see shows up just where it wants it to be, but in so intangible a form that no other eye is able to detect, no other mind finds ground to suspect its presence.1
The difference between the New York Times and blogs a century later is that the New York Times was dealing with at least somewhat worthy material. Bloggers latch onto the most tenuous wisps of news on places like Facebook or Twitter and then apply their “abnormal keenness” to seeing what is not there. A writer for the Mediabistro blog 10,000 Words once advised new bloggers that they could find good material by scanning community bulletin boards on craigslist for “what people are complaining about these days.”2 I’m not a sociologist, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t qualify as representative news. Considering that anyone can post anything on craigslist, this gives me a pretty good idea of how to create some fake local news. If they don’t mind seeing what isn’t there, marketers are happy to help. (My company once worked with a musician to leak some of their tracks on craigslist’s Missed Connections section.)
Angle-hunters sometimes come up empty. In a perfect world, writers should be able to explore a story lead, find it leads nowhere, and abandon it. But that luxury is not available online. As the veteran bloggers John Biggs and Charlie White put it in their book Bloggers Boot Camp, there is “no topic too mundane that you can’t pull a post out of it.”
This is their logic. As a marketer, it’s easy to fall in love with it. Blogs will publish anything if you manufacture urgency around it. Give a blogger an illusory twenty-minute head start over other media sources, and they’ll write whatever you want, however you want it. Publicists love to promise blogs the exclusive on an announcement. The plural there is not an accident. You can give the same made-up exclusive to multiple blogs, and they’ll fall all over themselves to publish first. Throw in an arbitrary deadline, like “We’re going live with this on our website first thing in the morning,” and even the biggest blogs will forget fact-checking and make bold pronouncements on your behalf.
Since bloggers must find an angle, they always do. Since you know how hard they’re looking, it’s easy to leave crumbs, fragments, or stray gems that you know will be impossible for them to resist picking up and turning into full-fledged stories. Small news is made to look like big news. Nonexistent news is puffed up and made into news. The result is stories that look just like their legitimate counterparts, only their premise is wrong and says nothing. Such stories hook with false pretenses, analyze false subjects, and inform falsely.
I told you earlier about how we paid celebrities to tweet offensive stuff. But the reality was we mostly tried to pay them to do it. Only the skeeviest of accounts actually agreed to do it and went through with it. But I still wanted the coverage, so we mocked up what the tweets would have looked like if they had said yes—what it would have looked like if Kim Kardashian had admitted she didn’t know how to read. The blogs that covered the story were fine with blurring the line between what happened and what almost happened or what could have happened, because it was better for business. The same went for when one of my clients, James Altucher, offered one of his books for sale via Bitcoin and another, a musician, Young & Sick, posted his album on the so-called dark net. In both cases like zero people actually bought them there—but since we made it seem like a much bigger deal than it was, media coverage ensued. Nobody bothered to investigate—why would they?
When I say it’s okay for you to make stuff up because everybody else is doing it, I’m not kidding. M. G. Siegler, once one of the dominant voices in tech blogging (TechCrunch, PandoDaily), is very blunt about this. According to him, most of what he and his competitors wrote is bullshit. “I won’t try to put some arbitrary label on it, like 80%,” he once admitted, “but it’s a lot. There’s more bullshit than there is 100% pure, legitimate information.”3
Shamelessness is a virtue in Siegler’s world. It helps create nothing from something. It helps people at the Huffington Post stomach creating stories like “Amy Winehouse’s Untimely Death Is a Wake Up Call for Small Business Owners.” The same holds true for reputable outlets too. They need only the slightest push to abandon all discretion, like the Daily Mail in the UK did when I had some deliberately provocative ads posted on the American Apparel website and pretended they were part of a new campaign. has american apparel gone to
o far with “creepy” controversial new campaign? the Mail’s headline read. According to whom had it gone too far? The article quoted “some tweeters.”4
Thanks for the free publicity, guys! Random people on Twitter are not a representative sample by any measure—but it got the company in the news. God knows what it would have cost to pay to run those full-page ads in their paper.
Whatever will be more exciting, get more pageviews, that is what blogs will say happened. Like when Gawker bought a scoop from a man who had pictures of a wild Halloween night with politician Christine O’Donnell. According to editor Remy Stern, the skeevy source’s one concern was “that a tabloid would imply that they had sex, which they did not.” The headline of the Gawker article was . . . drumroll . . . i had a one-night stand with christine o’donnell.”5
DO THEIR RESEARCH FOR THEM
One of the older (leftist) critiques of media is that media is dependent on existing power structures for information. Reporters have to wait for news from the police; they get facts and figures from government figures; they are reliant on celebrities and other news-makers for information. This is a totally valid criticism. It was true in 1950 and it’s really true now.
Newspapers and local media used to have the budget to send a reporter to local town hall meetings—now they don’t. They used to be able to pay to have an overseas bureau to get news where it was happening. Now they wait for the official report to come in. The AP, for instance, has actually started to outsource some of its reporting to India and in some cases to actual robots. When you read a short story about how the market went up three hundred points due to strong job numbers from the White House, it might be that a computer wrote that story, not a human being. My point is that the media is now even more dependent on others to do their research and work for them.