The Attention Merchants
Page 31
—
Ironically, it was contempt for advertising (on the part of the founders and the chief engineers) that would ultimately pave the way to the company’s unrivaled success as an attention merchant. The key was in renegotiating the terms under which the public was asked to tolerate ads. For as Google became a part of everyday life over the 2000s—its name becoming a synonym for search—it presented what seemed by the standards of the day a very reasonable tradeoff, which few would ever question, and which caused no degradation, to judge by earnings growth. So unintrusive was AdWords that some people didn’t even realize that Google was ad-supported: it just seemed to be there for the taking like manna from the heavens. Google had, in fact, laid bare what had originally been so miraculous about the attention merchant model—getting something truly desirable at no apparent cost. For what really seemed like nothing, the public got the best search ever designed and, in time, other goodies as well, like free email with unlimited storage, peerless maps, the world’s libraries, and even research devoted to exciting innovations like self-driving cars. Of course, there was, as there always is, a quid pro quo: in its ripest state, the buying public was exposed to sales pitches; which might prove useful but then again might not. Google also began to collect a lot of information about a lot of people. Nevertheless, Page, who had the most qualms about advertising, told Wired’s Steven Levy that he’d begun to feel that AdWords was a good and just innovation. “From that point on,” writes Levy, “Brin and Page saw nothing but glory in the bottom line.”18
Page may have felt he’d outwitted the Devil, but so do all Faustian characters. While the safeguards in AdWords would keep Google’s core product uncompromised for the time being, corporate life is long, and shareholder demand for growth unremitting. In Wall Street’s view, even the most robust advertising revenues always have room for improvement. In time, this reality would put pressure on the original bargain that Google struck with the public. Even if AdWords was a paradigm shift, it was still advertising, and Google, however ingenious, was still an attention merchant. It would, henceforth, always be serving two masters, beauty and the beast.
* * *
*1 Actually, there were two other ways to go, neither of them seriously considered. One would have been to rely on donations or patronage, a course later pursued by other publicly spirited projects like Wikipedia. The other was even more radical, and might have been contemplated by men like Google’s founders in an earlier time before the heady seductions of the dot-com boom. They might have made Google a truly public project, like email or the Internet itself.
*2 As Google’s first CEO, Page once fired all of Google’s managers, reasoning that they were not only useless, but interfered with engineering, what with all their meetings, planning sessions, and so on. He genuinely believed that engineers, like a flock of birds, were self-organizing creatures without need of oversight, and that, left to their own, they would produce miracles. See Nicholas Carlson, “The Untold Story of Larry Page’s Incredible Comeback,” Business Insider, April 24, 2014.
*3 Meanwhile, GoTo’s founder began to spiral downward as the dot-com market crashed. Battelle writes that “like so many leaders of the early Internet era, Bill Gross was smoking a little too much of his own stuff, and the party came to an abrupt and unhappy end.” An “unhappy end” may be an unusual description for a man who would sell his GoTo search engine to Yahoo! for over a billion dollars. Nonetheless, according to Battelle, “A Tone of regret and a tinge of pain shade his recollections.” Gross would later put a brave face on his role. “I’m wildly proud,” he said to Slate in 2013, “of coming up with the paid-search model.” See Will Oremus, “Google’s Big Break,” Slate, October 13, 2013. GoTo would also create regulatory problems for Yahoo! with the Federal Trade Commission. Like Brin and Page, the FTC looked at the practice of mixing advertised and organic results and did not like it. But where the engineers saw a corrupted process, the lawyers saw a form of consumer deception. In the FTC’s view, the paid-for search results were a form of advertisement that was not clearly labeled as such, and therefore illegally deceptive.
CHAPTER 21
HERE COMES EVERYONE
Google and a few other West Coast companies had demonstrated that web advertising wasn’t just hype: there was real money to be made reselling attention captured by the Internet. But Google had effectively put AdWords on the remote control; there remained a lot more attention to be harvested the old-fashioned way. That much was clear from the simple fact that by the early 2000s, the average white-collar worker had a screen on his desk with a fairly high-speed connection to the Internet. Designed, theoretically, to create a more productive work environment, this setup, by the law of unintended consequences, also created ripe new opportunities to harvest attention. As observer Jonah Peretti had noticed:
Hundreds of millions of bored office workers sit in front of computers forwarding emails, blogging, IMing, and playing….These distracted corporate employees have accidentally created the Bored at Work Network (BWN)—a huge people-powered network with even greater reach than traditional networks like CNN, ABC, or the BBC.
Whose harvest would it be? The race was on.
In November 2000, The New Yorker ran a piece introducing the world to something new. It went like this:
Meg Hourihan was in a bad mood. She had nothing major to worry about, but she was afflicted by the triple malaise of a woman in her late twenties: (a) the weather was lousy; (b) she was working too hard; and (c) she didn’t have a boyfriend. Nothing, not even eating, seemed very interesting to her. The only thing that did sound appealing was moving to France and finding a hot new French boyfriend, but even when she talked about that idea she struck a sardonic, yeah-right-like-I’m-really-going-to-do-that kind of tone.
I know this about Meg because I read it a few months ago on her personal Web site, which is called Megnut.com. I’ve been reading Megnut for a while now, and so I know all kinds of things about its author. I know that she’s a little dreamy and idealistic; that she fervently believes there is a distinction between “dot-com people,” who are involved in the Internet for its I.P.O. opportunities, and “web people,” who are in love with the imaginative possibilities presented by the medium, and that she counts herself among the latter.1
What was this new form of confessional? It was, the author Rebecca Mead explained, “a new kind of Web site that is known as a ‘weblog,’ or ‘blog.’ ” As she explained, “Having a blog is rather like publishing your own, on-line version of Reader’s Digest, with daily updates”; yet with a conversational element: “other people who have blogs—they are known as bloggers—read your blog, and if they like it they blog your blog on their own blog.” Of course, one didn’t have to blog about your problems, the way Meg did. You could blog about anything. Here was an attention-capturing format that was truly different, even if the force drawing attention to it was not quite clear.
One would have thought that the traditional news media—newspapers and magazines—were in the best natural position to capture the attention lavished on all those connected screens at work and at home. After all, such media were originally designed for such slivers of attention, the little breaks that people take during their day. But newspapers were particularly slow and resentful about adapting their content to the web; they fretted about unreliable Internet reporting, erosion of revenues from print, and other typical concerns of an incumbent business being disrupted. Their hidebound attitude did not excite new users of the web.
And so the opportunity was seized from them by a wide and disparate group who came effectively out of nowhere, or at least no place previously recognized as a precinct of the attention industries. “Here comes everybody” is how Clay Shirky described it.2 It was the arrival of an unsuspected creative class, fulfilling Lawrence Lessig’s prophecy that putting the new tools in the hands of anyone who wanted to try publishing or any creativity for a broader audience would yield a boon to society. Shirky again: “Social t
ools remove older obstacles to public expression, and thus remove the bottlenecks that characterized mass media. The result is the mass amateurization of efforts previously reserved for media professionals.”3
On the web, the early 2000s belonged to the bloggers and their fellow travelers, a surprising cohort different from most of what had come before.4 Their cultural roots lay in the Internet’s noncommercial prehistory of the 1980s. In 1999, a book titled The Cluetrain Manifesto described these years on the web. “It was technically obscure, impenetrable, populated by geeks and wizards, loners, misfits”; but it “became a place where people could talk to other people without constraint. Without filters or censorship or official sanction—and perhaps most significantly, without advertising….The attraction was in speech, however mediated. In people talking, however slowly. And mostly, the attraction lay in the kinds of things they were saying. Never in history had so many had the chance to know what so many others were thinking on such a wide range of subjects.”5
David Weinberger, an early online marketing guru and a blogger since, explains what the early webloggers were getting at. “When blogs came along, they became the way we could have a Web presence that enabled us to react, respond, and provoke.”6 Already by that period, the web offered a way to create and project a public version of the self, a path toward Marcuse’s liberation and the transcendence of hierarchy that the old media world imposed. As Weinberger writes, “My blog was me. My blog was the Web equivalent of my body. Being-on-the-Web was turning out to be even more important and more fun than we’d thought it would be….We thought we were participating in a revolution. And we were somewhat right.”
By their nature the new creators varied but were unified by a pioneering spirit and a bracingly amateur affect. Among them were: a site named the Drudge Report, launched in the 1990s, which gained much attention with its timely leaks related to a scandal surrounding President Bill Clinton’s affair with an intern; Slashdot.org, launched in 1997, to bring “news for nerds”; the Robot Wisdom, with links to news stories and aiming to establish a link between artificial intelligence and the work of James Joyce; Megnut.com and Kottke.org, the personal blogs of two Internet entrepreneurs who would eventually marry; “The Instapundit” Glenn Reynolds, a libertarian expert on the law of outer space, who gained an audience coupling his pithy one-liners with news of the day. Boing-Boing, originally a printed zine published by Mark Frauenfelder, added author Cory Doctorow and other writers to become a wildly popular blog, presenting a daily “directory of mostly wonderful things.”
Those are only a few of the better known. In this golden age of “conversational content” or “user-generated media,” a following of some kind suddenly seemed within reach of just about anyone with something to say. It was as if some vault in which the public’s attention was kept had been blown open and the looters were taking what they could. A blog about ex-boyfriends; reflections on Brideshead Revisited, vintage Honda motorcycles—all had their constituency. And thanks to search, it wasn’t that hard to match one’s interests with a new world of content. Some of the more prominent new bloggers were current or former journalists, trained to write freely and quickly. Technologists started their own blogs, too, unreadable to the general public. Philosophers, economists, scientists, and other experts emerged from their ivory towers to address one another and motivated laymen in a manner far more recondite than might ever be found in the mainstream media. Some would blog essentially for themselves and those nearest to them, to keep track of their travels, or as a kind of family journal. They sometimes called themselves “escribitionists” before “blogger” became the word.7 Like an army of miniature Oprah Winfreys, each successful blog created a following and its own little community. Zephyr Teachout, the director of Internet organizing for the 2004 Howard Dean campaign, likened successful bloggers to pastors, each leading their loyal flocks.
Consequently, audiences were fragmented to a degree that made cable television look like the days of The Ed Sullivan Show. The regular follower of, say, the blogger Andrew Sullivan would have to be interested in a pro-war gay conservative viewpoint that also advocated for Catholicism, marijuana, beards, beagles, and same-sex marriage. Readers of Boing Boing or Slashdot were people whose truest affiliation was to a neo-geek mentality that celebrated eccentricity and arcane obsessions. Such groups were nothing like the clear demographic categories of old, or even the relatively precise PRIZM clusters. In fact, bloggers sometimes claimed they were creating a-geographical communities, aggregations purely by common interest and passion. And since bloggers had, at least initially, no expectation of making money, there was no temptation to compromise their standards or temper their opinions.
That anyone could start one was not the only radical feature of the blog. The form also popularized the idea of “sharing” as a means of drawing attention to things. This represented a real break with earlier models of attention harvesting, whose ideal of centralized authority was somewhere between the Third Reich’s enforced listening and the nationwide audiences of I Love Lucy: everyone gathering to listen to a single voice reaching the entire nation. Sharing was still primitive, amounting mostly to the trading of links, but it was already proving a powerful alternative means for information to spread, more in the manner of gossip or a conversation than a broadcast. It was another step toward what we now experience as the “social” proliferation of information and opinion.*
The eventual dichotomy would be between “packaged media” (what the attention merchant traditionally offered) and the new “user-generated content” or “social media” created by the public at large, and of which the blog was but one element. The wave of noncommercial content creation produced would spread across formats and media with varying degrees of success. Wikipedia, the user-created encyclopedia with no central editor, became a surprising triumph over the early 2000s, drawing on the labor mainly of obsessive young men interested in making relatively anonymous contributions to a larger project. But unlike Google and others, when Wikipedia came to its own fork in the road, gaining enough traffic to rival or exceed that of nearly any other site, save the search engines, it chose the other path; deciding to remain free of advertising, it effectively forsook billions in potential revenue. The founder, Jimmy Wales, officially explained the decision as follows: “I think of Wikipedia as I do a library or a school—and commercial advertising is not right in that space….Maximizing revenue is not our goal.”8
Subscribing to the same basic philosophy as the bloggers and Wikipedia was a new company named YouTube, which launched in 2005; based on user-generated video along with a fair number of clips borrowed from other sources, its purpose was to facilitate the sharing of such content. With consumer digital video technology now cheaper and better than ever, YouTube proved an instant and enormous hit; and it was particularly attractive in its early days, when there was no advertising, and no enforcement of the copyright laws. Within a year, the company reported that it was serving 100 million daily video views and accepting uploads of some 65,000 new videos. Thus YouTube became the Internet’s first successful challenge to what television offered. But unlike Microsoft’s blinkered efforts to seize that turf, YouTube was, for better or for worse, actually creating a new genre; the site attracted snippets of commercial content, along with performances of amateur and professional musicians, raconteurs, anyone who imagined they might become a star in their pajamas.
In a new blog for The New York Times, still creeping web-ward, Virginia Heffernan argued in 2006 that the long-anticipated “convergence” of television and the Internet—what Microsoft had trumpeted in the 1990s—seemed finally to be happening. And it was taking a bewildering number of forms: “web video, viral video, user-driven video, custom interactive video, consumer-generated video, embedded video ads, web-based VOD, broadband television, diavlogs, vcasts, vlogs, video podcasts, mobisodes, webisodes and mashups.”9
Whether highbrow or low, the bloggers and their fellow travelers reveled in the sen
se that they were upending the entire attentional dynamic—democratizing speech and attention to the point that “everyone” could now potentially be both a speaker and an audience, replicating, in some ways, the naïveté of the world before the rise of a mass media. There was some sense that bloggers were essentially entertaining one another, as people did before radio or the record player. But there is no doubt that a platform anyone could use jostled the media hierarchy and its authority.
The statistics bore out a sense that there were countless voices speaking (if sometimes only to themselves, but never mind). In 2005 Nielsen estimated that 35 million Americans were reading blogs; yet that same year, another organization estimated there were 50 million blogs in existence, suggesting more blogs than readers.10 Collectively, the blogs exerted the influence of a kind of ongoing national conversation. In his somewhat obscure way, Jeffrey Jarvis declared that “in our post-scarcity world, distribution is not king and neither is content. Conversation is the kingdom, and trust is king.”11