by Tim Wu
Some credited the idea, but in media it’s not the thought that counts; critics were harsher and louder. And no one came in for more abuse than the partner who’d lent her name. “Celebs to the Slaughter,” wrote LA Weekly: “Judging from Monday’s horrific debut of the humongously pre-hyped celebrity blog the Huffington Post, the Madonna of the mediapolitic world has undergone one reinvention too many. She has now made an online ass of herself….Her blog is such a bomb that it’s the movie equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate rolled into one.”
In retrospect, critics like the LA Weekly’s were only proving how little they understood the Internet. Peretti, Lerer, and Huffington were each masters of attention capture, and their collaboration proved more than the sum of its parts. Over time, the political mission was dialed back somewhat—Huffington herself had, after all, previously been a conservative pundit who’d called for the resignation of President Clinton. Soon the Huffington Post was inviting not just celebrities to contribute but students, politicos, activists, book authors—just about anyone except the professional reporter or normal freelancer who expected to be paid. It was a degree of openness more akin to the early days of the web and blogosphere than any older model of media. Minimal costs, maximum traffic, and irresistible content above all—that was the formula.6
In pursuit of the third element of its triad, the HuffPo pioneered what would become known as clickbait: sensationally headlined articles, paired with provocative pictures—a bikini-clad celebrity was always good. (“Watch Naked Heidi Klum in Seal’s New Video”).*1 When properly calibrated, such content seemed to take control of the mind, causing the hand almost involuntarily to click on whatever was there. The HuffPo’s “news” was more provocative, more enticing—more clickable—than its competitors’; even for serious topics it managed to channel lurid fascination. To the chagrin of its critics, it quickly outpaced sites like LA Weekly and by the fall of 2007 was capturing more attention than other web magazines like Slate and Salon, despite their paid writers. By 2010 it was beating most of the newspapers as well. With 24 million monthly readers, it was slightly behind The New York Times, but ahead of The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the rest of what was then called the mainstream media. As the Columbia Journalism Review put it, “The Huffington Post has mastered and fine-tuned not just aggregation, but also social media, comments from readers, and most of all, a sense of what its public wants.”7
And yet The Huffington Post never actually made much money. While its financials have never been fully public, there is good reason to believe it has never turned a solid profit. For one thing, advertisers categorized The Huffington Post as political commentary, and generally, the big-brand advertisers, the Fortune 500, despite the numbers weren’t willing to put their names on HuffPo’s pages. Others tended to credit Google for its traffic. All of this combined to make the site able to sell its impressions for only the lowest rates to bottom-tier advertisers (e.g., “This weird trick can take an inch off your waistline”). The Huffington Post wasn’t making money, but it was nonetheless sucking attention from everything else—especially journalists—on the web. That’s probably why The Washington Post’s executive editor slammed it and similar sites as “parasites living off journalism produced by others.”
The Huffington Post wasn’t alone. Over the 2000s, none of the pure, content-driven attention merchants were lucrative. This was, in part, because advertisers realized with so many attention merchants in competition, they didn’t necessarily need to “underwrite” the media industry in the manner that they had for newspapers, radio, or television. As advertising executive Rishad Tobaccowala put it in 2010, advertisers long since had grown tired and resentful of any project other than reaching consumers with ads. Fundamentally they “don’t want to pay for creation of content.”
So while The Huffington Post certainly succeeded in its original goal of driving more web traffic toward the political left, in most other ways it ended up pleasing no one. Established, traditional newspapers, with their crushing overhead, hated it most. Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, was indignant. “Too often it amounts to taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own Web site and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material. In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model.” Meanwhile, for the dreamers and idealists who always wanted the web to be not just different but loftier and better, the HuffPo’s relentless dependence on celebrity and clickbait was something of a bitter pill.
If they weren’t good at making money, no one could deny that those running the site knew how to harvest attention, and for that reason it changed the rules of the game. Like the New York Sun in the 1830s or People magazine in the 1970s, HuffPo forced the competition to become more like it. Relatively sober sites like Slate and Salon grew more gossipy, superficial, and click-driven; in time, even traditional newspaper websites were also forced to adapt themselves to the standard set by a site with unpaid writers and features on celebrity sideboob. To varying degrees, the style of everything seemed to drift toward tabloid and away from broadsheet, to borrow the parlance of print.8
AOL, seeking its own resurrection,*2 and having noticed the gap between The Huffington Post’s traffic and its advertising rates, bought the site in 2011 for $315 million and began throwing money at it in an effort to make the site more respectable. This bearing upwind, a variant on CBS’s “Tiffany” strategy from the 1930s, would, it was hoped, attract a higher class of advertiser. With more money, The Huffington Post was now able to hire seasoned reporters who were given full freedom and resources to write on what they wanted. The strategy yielded a Pulitzer Prize for The Huffington Post’s David Wood, a war correspondent who’d cut his teeth at Time in the 1970s and had also worked at the Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, and other papers. So the HuffPost gained some dignity, but because it was expensive still failed to create large profits. Yet by 2015, it was attracting more attention than ever, and management was still saying things like “We could make it profitable right now if we wanted it to be.” Perhaps the site was by its nature never really meant to be a business exactly, but instead just a giant vacuum sucking up human attention.9
Looking for work and blogging in his spare time, in late 2004, Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr., a young Cuban American actor in Miami, was one of many doing the same thing. He’d scored one appearance on The Sopranos, as “Male Student,” as well as a role in the low-budget horror film Campfire Stories, which received an audience rating of 2.9 out of 10 on the Internet Movie Database. Blogging was something he started, he would later confess, “because it seemed easy.” Whether or not it turned out to be so, Lavandeira was inspired to blog at almost the very moment Lerer approached Peretti about The Huffington Post. But rather than use famous people to bring attention to a political point of view, Lavandeira would put them to the purest use an attention merchant can have. He devoted his blog to celebrity gossip, purposefully making it snarkier and more malicious than anything ever seen before.
He named it “Pagesixsixsix.com” a mash-up of the New York Post’s gossipy Page Six and, presumably, the Antichrist; riffing on The New York Times’s motto that his blog was “All the news, gossip and satire that’s unfit to print (anywhere else).” Lavandeira described himself as the “Raconteur, Iconoclast, Proselytizer and the Maniacal Mastermind behind Page SixSixSix.” A sample headline from his early work: “Hilary Duff Is a Lying Bitch!! In a recent interview, Hilary not only had the fucking audacity to defend Ashlee Simpson’s lip-synching fracas on Saturday Night Live, but she went so far as to actually claim that she doesn’t lip-synch herself. Puhhhleeeaze biyatch!”
The blog might have gone unnoticed and, like most, expired, but something about Lavandeira’s particular blend of venom and star adulation made it take off. It didn’t hurt that it was named “Hollywood’s Most Hated Website” by one TV show, leading to a traffic boom, or that i
t received a legal complaint from the New York Post, which noticed that its trademark “Page Six” had been appropriated. Lavandeira gave up on Pagesixsixsix.com (which was anyhow hard to type) and took as his nom de blog Perez Hilton. Who, exactly, was Perez Hilton supposed to be? Lavandeira posed as the “trashtastic Cuban cousin of Paris and Nicky [Hilton],” the socialite sister heiresses famous in the early 2000s. Over the latter part of the decade, Perez Hilton, and commercial imitators, like TMZ, presented a new face of blogging. Far from the highbrow musing of citizen journalists of the digital commons, the sort imagined at the turn of the millennium, the gossip blogs were full-fledged attention merchants in the most conventional sense. By 2007, Perez Hilton was claiming some four million unique visitors a day and selling advertisements for $9,000 a week.10
Perez Hilton was not the only wildly popular fictive persona made possible by the anonymity of the web. In 2006 the best-known face on YouTube was Lonelygirl15, a cute but awkward teenage girl whose first video was entitled “First Blog / Dorkiness Prevails.” Speaking to the camera, her chin on one raised knee, she plaintively intones, “Hi guys…this is my video blog…um….I’m such a dork…” It was only later revealed that Lonelygirl15 was in fact a paid actress. Her show was scripted, based on her producers’ guess of what an amateur video blogger might look like. Their success in getting the right effect would lead to more business for the production company EQAL, which, having proved it could aggregate a boatload of attention, would be commissioned to produce more content, including an original web series for CBS. As for Jessica Rose, the actress hired for the hoax, she would be cast in a web TV series called Sorority Forever, as well as the cable series Greek. An Anaheim Ducks fan, she would also begin blogging for the National Hockey League. Every bit of attention helps.11
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The success of The Huffington Post and of Lonelygirl15 and the celebrity gossip sites was something of an early sign that even by the end of its first decade, the amateur phase of the web was already coming to an end. Wikipedia reached its peak of 51,000 active editors in 2007, and from that point onward began to shed contributors; by 2013 it would lose more than 20,000, never having expanded beyond its committed core of young men with time on their hands. Across the web, one sensed a general waning of enthusiasm, as if the air were escaping from the balloon.
It was no different among the original amateur bloggers, whose creative energy once seemed inexhaustible. A common story line emerged: after posting away for some time, many began to notice that their pronouncements were reaching far fewer souls than they’d thought, perhaps based on an imperfect understanding of the web itself. Even trying to get more seemed hopeless: “If you do everything people tell you to do,” one blogger lamented, “you can get up to about 100 visitors a day, but then it’s like you hit an invisible wall.” David Weinberger recalls the moment that, for him, “rang the tocsin”:
[Clay Shirky’s] analysis showed that the blogosphere wasn’t a smooth ball where everyone had an equal voice. Rather, it was dominated by a handful of sites that pulled enormous numbers, followed by a loooooooooong tail of sites with a few followers. The old pernicious topology had reasserted itself. We should have known that it would, and it took a while for the miserable fact to sink in.
Not that it was all wine and roses for the bloggers who did persist and claw their way up to being full-blooded attention merchants. Like the New York newspapers of the 1830s, they would find themselves in ever more intense competition, in which the lurid and titillating and exaggerated typically prevailed. For every serious and earnest political blog, there was always an alternative prepared to throw red meat before fire-breathing partisans, or else go the full tabloid route. Wonkette, for instance, became the Perez Hilton of Beltway gossip, gaining enormous attention by showcasing Jessica Cutler, a congressional staffer who blogged about steamy details of her affairs with various government officials. Likewise, serious blogs by esteemed law professors found themselves vying with “Article III Groupie,” an anonymous poster who covered the federal judiciary in tell-all style.12
As if tabloid journalism weren’t challenge enough, the amateur bloggers also now faced professional competition of several kinds. A British journalist living in New York named Nick Denton launched a carefully curated blog named Gizmodo, covering gadgets and technology, and another named Gawker, co-launched with Elizabeth Spiers, which disseminated media gossip (Wonkette was also part of what would become the Gawker group). The political blogs also professionalized: the Daily Kos, a one-man left-leaning Talking Points Memo, hired staff to run more ambitious coverage. Major newspapers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, assigned experienced journalists to blog full-time, leveraging all of the authority and prestige of the old media to go after the new audience. Whatever power lay in what Yochai Benkler had called the “wealth of networks,” the old media’s trick of paying people still had some power as well. More work for the journalists, perhaps, but it did stem the flow of attention away from legacy media.
In 2008, Wired magazine offered the following advice to those interested in launching a blog:
Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug….The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths….Scroll down Technorati’s list of the top 100 blogs and you’ll find personal sites have been shoved aside by professional ones. Most are essentially online magazines: The Huffington Post. Engadget. TreeHugger. A stand-alone commentator can’t keep up with a team of pro writers cranking out up to 30 posts a day.
By the end of the decade, the truly amateur blogger or videographer was something of a rarity, an eccentric hanging on from a different age. Most everyone else was either blogging as part of his job, writing for some professional blog, or had long since hung up his guns. Even Lawrence Lessig, the prophet of a free culture, retired his blog, claiming a degree of exhaustion.
But the public remained online, and in ever greater numbers. Just where were all those creative energies so recently unleashed going now? As the decade ended, a new set of companies were learning how they could effectively feed off that energy themselves, in some sense co-opting all the yearning for conversation and user-generated content. The new sites called themselves “social networks,” and keeping up on one was much easier than maintaining a blog. As that Wired magazine piece further advised: “The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is [now] better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.” Old wine in new bottles? Not quite. In the guise of bringing people together, these networks would wire the most invasive attention capture apparatus yet invented into millions upon millions of lives. What were the terms for that arrangement? As with any user agreement, it was in the provider’s interest that one click “accept” quickly, and not wade into the fine print.13
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*1 The phrase clickbait is related to earlier slang like “draft bait” or “jail bait” and was first recorded in 1999, though it came to widespread usage in the early 2010s.
*2 Despite its advertising-related accounting fraud and other problems in the early 2000s, AOL nonetheless stayed in business based on its large if declining base of subscribers who continued to pay a monthly fee for their email accounts or dial-up access.
CHAPTER 23
THE PLACE TO BE
In 2004, with the Internet revolution already in its adolescence, Harvard University’s computer services began work on what it described as an “electronic facebook.” The term “facebook” traditionally referred to a physical booklet produced at American universities to promote socialization in the way that “Hi, My Name Is” stickers do at events; the pages consisted of rows upon rows of head shots with the corresponding name, and perhaps the class and residence underneath. How else were total strangers thrown together in dormitories to find friends and maybe
romantic or sexual partners? “We’ve been in touch with the Undergraduate Council, and this is a very high priority for the College,” said Harvard’s residential computing director in mid-2004. “We have every intention of completing the facebook by the end of the spring semester.”1
So Harvard computer services had an idea and they were running with it. But a nineteen-year-old undergraduate named Mark Zuckerberg—a gifted programmer in full possession of all the arrogance of youth, who loved nothing more than to hack out code overnight—felt compelled to show he could do the job better and faster. Zuckerberg had already accomplished a number of complicated computer projects with his friends. “We were just building stuff,” he said later, “ ’cause we thought it was cool.” Unfortunately, his last little effort, hacking the student picture database while under the influence, had landed him on academic probation. He recounted the mischief in real time on his blog:
I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10 pm and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland dormitory facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive….Let the hacking begin.2
With that he created Facemash, a Harvard-only version of the rating site “Hot or Not.” In Zuckerberg’s adaptation, two undergraduate women’s photos appeared, and the user selected the more attractive. Zuckerberg showed a certain flair for gaining attention, but after complaints, he went before the school’s Administration Board charged with breaching security, infringing the photograph copyrights, and violating individual privacy. He was let off with a warning.*1