Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator

by Ryan Holiday

  I trick the bloggers, and they trick their readers. This arrangement is great for the traffic-hungry bloggers, for me, and for my attention-seeking clients. Readers might be better served by posts that inform them about things that really matter. But, as you saw in the last chapter, stories with useful information are less likely to be shared virally than other types of content.

  For example: Movie reviews, in-depth tutorials, technical analysis, and recipes are typically popular with the initial audience and occasionally appear on most e-mailed lists. But they tend not to draw significant amounts of traffic from other websites. They are less fun to share and spread less as a result. This may seem counterintuitive at first, but it makes perfect sense according to the economics of online content. Commentary on top of someone else’s commentary or advice is cumbersome and often not very interesting to read. Worse, the writer of the original material may have been so thorough as to have solved the problem or proffered a reasonable solution—two very big dampers on a getting a heated debate going.

  For blogs, practical utility is often a liability. It is a traffic killer. So are other potentially positive attributes. It’s hard to get trolls angry enough to comment while being fair or reasonable. Waiting for the whole story to unfold can be a surefire way to eliminate the possibility for follow-up posts. So can pointing out that an issue is frivolous. Being the voice of reason does also. No blogger wants to write about another blogger who made him or her look bad.

  To use an exclamation point, to refer back to Denton’s remark, is to be final. Being final, or authoritative, or helpful, or any of these obviously positive attributes is avoided, because they don’t bait user engagement. And engaged users are where the money is.

  GETTING ENGAGED WITH CONTENT

  Before objecting that “user engagement” is a good thing, let’s look at it in practice. Pretend for a second that you read an article on the blog Politico about an issue that makes you angry. Angry enough that you must let the author know how you feel about it: You go to leave a comment.

  Here’s how it went for me the other day:

  You must be logged in to comment, the site tells me. Not yet a member? Register now. When I click, a new page comes up with ads all across it. I fill out the form on the page, handing over my e-mail address, gender, and city, and hit Submit. Damn it, I didn’t type the CAPTCHA right, so the page reloads with another ad. Finally I get it right and get the confirmation page (another page, another ad). Now I check my e-mail. Welcome to Politico!, it tells me: Click this link to validate your account. (Now they can spam me later with e-mails with more ads!) Registration is now complete, it says: another page and another ad. I’m asked to log in, so I do. More pages, more ads, but now I can finally share my opinion with the author. I am “engaged.”

  This is how it is everywhere. It might take as many as ten pageviews to leave a comment on a blog the first time. The Huffington Post makes a big show of asking users to rate its articles on a scale from one to ten. What happens when you do that? It shows you another page and another ad. Or when you see a mistake in an article and fill out the Send Corrections form? Well, first they’ll need your e-mail address, and then they ask if you want to receive daily e-mails from them.

  When you do this, you are the sucker. The site doesn’t care about your opinion; it cares that, by eliciting it, they score free pageviews. I just got tired of being toyed with and decided to use this system to my advantage.

  The best way to get online coverage is to tee a blogger up with a story that will obviously generate comments (or votes, or shares, or whatever). This impossible maze of pageviews is so lucrative that bloggers can’t help but try to lure readers into it. Following that logic, when I whisper to a blog about something disgusting that Tucker Max supposedly did, what I am really doing is giving the writer a chance to invite the readers to comment with “Eww!!!” or “What a misogynist!” I’m also giving Tucker’s fans a chance to hear about it and come to his defense. Nobody involved actually cares what any of these people think or are feeling—not even a little bit. But I am giving the blog a way to make money at their expense.

  YOU ARE BEING PLAYED

  A click is a click and a pageview is a pageview. A blogger doesn’t care how they get it. Their bosses don’t care. They just want it.*

  The headline is there to get you to view the article, end of story. Whether you get anything out of it after is irrelevant—the click already happened. The Comments section is meant to be used. So are those Share buttons at the bottom of every post. The dirty truth, as Venkatesh Rao, the entrepreneur in residence at Xerox, pointed out, is that

  social media isn’t a set of tools to allow humans to communicate with humans. It is a set of embedding mechanisms to allow technologies to use humans to communicate with each other, in an orgy of self-organizing…. The Matrix had it wrong. You’re not the battery power in a global, human-enslaving AI, you are slightly more valuable. You are part of the switching circuitry.1

  As a user, the fact that blogs are not helpful, deliberately misleading, or unnecessarily incendiary might exhaust and tire you, but Orwell reminded us in 1984: “The weariness of the cell is the vigor of the organism.”

  So goes the art of the online publisher: To string the customer along as long as possible, to deliberately not be helpful, is to turn simple readers into pageview-generating machines. Publishers know they have to make each new headline even more irresistible than the last, the next article even more inflammatory or less practical to keep getting clicks. It’s a vicious cycle in which, by screwing the reader and getting screwed by me, they must screw the reader harder next time to top what they did before.

  And sure, sometimes people get mad when they realize they’ve been tricked. Readers don’t like to learn that the story they read was baseless. Bloggers don’t like it when they discover I played them. But this is a calculated risk bloggers and I both take, mostly because the consequences are so low. In the rare cases we’re caught red-handed, it’s not like we have to give the money we made back. As Juvenal joked, “What’s infamy matter if you can keep your fortune?”

  * As Richard Greenblatt—maybe the greatest hacker who has ever lived—told Wired in 2010, “There’s a dynamic now that says, let’s format our web page so people have to push the button a lot so that they’ll see lots of ads. Basically, the people who win are those who manage to make things the most inconvenient for you.”

  VIII

  TACTIC #5

  SELL THEM SOMETHING THEY CAN SELL (EXPLOIT THE ONE-OFF PROBLEM)

  I’M NO MEDIA SCHOLAR, BUT IN MY FANATICAL SEARCH for what makes bloggers tick, I turned to every media historian I could find and devoured their work. Through these experts I started to see that the very way that blogs get their articles in front of readers predetermines what they write. Just like the yellow press of a century ago, blogs are at the mercy of unrelenting pressures that compel them to manipulate the news, and be manipulated in turn.

  History lessons can be boring but trust me, in this case, a brief one is worth it because it unlocks a new angle of media control. Once you know how the newsmen sell their product, it becomes easier to sell them yours.

  There are three distinct phases of the newspaper (which have been synonymous with “the news” for most of history). It begins with the Party Press, moves to the infamous Yellow Press, and ends finally with the stable period of the Modern Press (or press by subscription). These phases contain surprising parallels to where we are today with blogs—old mistakes made once more, manipulations made possible again for the first time in decades.

  THE PARTY PRESS

  The earliest forms of newspapers were a function of political parties. These were media outlets for party leaders to speak to party members, to give them the information they needed and wanted. It’s a part of news history that is often misunderstood or misused in discussions about media bias.

  These papers were not some early version of Fox News. They usually were one-man shops.
The editor-publisher-writer-printer was the dedicated steward of a very valuable service to that party in his town. The service was the ability to communicate ideas and information about important issues. These political papers sold the service to businessmen, politicians, and voters.

  It was sold on a subscription model, typically about ten dollars a year. A good paper might have only a thousand or so subscribers, but they were almost always mandatory for party members in certain areas, which was a kind of patronage.

  This first stage of journalism was limited in its scope and impact. Because of the size and nature of its audience, the party press was not in the news business. They were in the editorial business. It was a different time and style, one that would be eclipsed by changes in technology and distribution.

  THE YELLOW PRESS

  Newspapers changed the moment that Benjamin Day launched the New York Sun in 1833. It was not so much his paper that changed everything but his way of selling it: on the street, one copy at a time. He hired the unemployed to hawk his papers and immediately solved a major problem that had plagued the party presses: unpaid subscriptions. Day’s “cash and carry” method offered no credit. You bought and walked. The Sun, with this simple innovation in distribution, invented the news and the newspaper. A thousand imitators followed.

  These papers weren’t delivered to your doorstep. They had to be exciting and loud enough to fight for their sales on street corners, in barrooms, and at train stations.* Because of the change in distribution methods and the increased speed of the printing press, newspapers truly became newspapers. Their sole aim was to get new information, get it to print faster, get it more exclusively than their competition. It meant the decline of the editorial. These papers relied on gossip. Papers that resisted failed and went out of business—like abolitionist Horace Greeley’s disastrous attempt at a gossip-free cash-and-carry paper shortly before Day’s.

  In 1835, shortly after Day began, James Gordon Bennett, Sr. launched the New York Herald. Within just a few years the Herald would be the largest circulation daily in the United States, perhaps in the world. It would also be the most sensational and vicious.

  It was all these things not because of Bennett’s personal beliefs but because of his business beliefs. He knew that the newspaper’s role was “not to instruct but to startle.” His paper was anti-black, anti-immigrant, and anti-subtlety. These causes sold papers—to both people who loved them for it and people who hated them for it. And they bought and they bought.

  Bennett was not alone. Joseph Pulitzer, a sensationalist newsmonger long before his name was softened by years of association with the prestigious Pulitzer Prize, enforced a similar dictum with his paper: The World would be “not only cheap but bright, not only bright but large.” It had to be, in order to sell thousands of papers every morning to busy people in a busy city.

  The need to sell every issue anew each day creates a challenge I call the “One-Off Problem.” Bennett’s papers solved it by getting attention however they could.

  The first issue of Bennett’s Herald looked like this: First page—eye-catching but quickly digestible miscellany; Second page—the heart of the paper, editorial and news; Third page—local; Fourth page—advertising and filler. There was something for everyone. It was short, zesty. He later tried to emphasize quality editorial instead of disposable news by swapping the first two pages. The results were disastrous. He couldn’t sell papers on the street that way.

  The One-Off Problem shaped more than just the design and layout of the newspaper. When news is sold on a one-off basis, publishers can’t sit back and let the news come to them. There isn’t enough of it, and what comes naturally isn’t exciting enough. So they must create the news that will sell their papers. When reporters were sent out to cover spectacles and events, they knew that their job was to cover the news when it was there and to make it up when it was not.*

  This is exactly the same position blogs are in today. Just as blogs are fine with manipulators easing their burden, so too were the yellow papers.

  Yellow papers paid large sums to tipsters and press agents. Fakes and embellishments were so pervasive that the noted diarist and lawyer George Templeton Strong almost didn’t believe the Civil War had commenced. In April 1861 he wrote in his diary that he and his friends had deliberately ignored noise they heard—the streets “vocal with newsboys” shouting “Extra!—a Herald. Get the bombardment of Fort Sumter!!!”—for nearly four blocks, because they were convinced it was a “sell.” That Fort Sumter issue, which Strong broke down and bought, sold 135,000 copies in a single day. It was the most printed issue in the history of the Herald. The success of that war was what drove yellow papers to clamor for (and some say create) the Spanish-American War. As Benjamin Day put it: “We newspaper people thrive best on the calamities of others.”

  Media historian W. J. Cambell once identified the distinguishing markers of yellow journalism as follows:

  • Prominent headlines that screamed excitement about ultimately unimportant news

  • Lavish use of pictures (often of little relevance)

  • Impostors, frauds, and faked interviews

  • Color comics and a big, thick Sunday supplement

  • Ostentatious support for the underdog causes

  • Use of anonymous sources

  • Prominent coverage of high society and events

  Besides the Sunday supplement, does any of that sound familiar? Perhaps you should pull up Gawker or the Huffington Post for a second to jog your memory.

  This realization was a common occurrence during the writing of this book. I often felt I could take media criticism written one hundred years ago, change a few words, and describe exactly how blogs work. Knowing the trademarks of yellow journalism from this era made it possible for me to know how to give blogs what they “want” in this era. But more on that later.

  As the daily sales of these papers soared, they become incredibly attractive opportunities for advertisers, particularly with the advent of large corporations and department stores. The rates these new advertisers paid propelled newspapers to boost readership even more.

  Master promoters like Bennett, Pulitzer, and William Randolph Hearst delivered. Their skyrocketing circulations were driven by one thing: escalating sensationalism. Welcome to the intersection of the One-Off Problem and ad-driven journalism.

  THE MODERN STABLE PRESS (BY SUBSCRIPTION)

  Just as James Gordon Bennett embodied the era of sensational yellow journalism, another man, Adolph S. Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, ushered in the next iteration of news.

  Ochs, like most great businessmen, understood that doing things differently was the way to great wealth. In the case of his newly acquired newspaper and the dirty, broken world of yellow journalism, he made the pronouncement that “decency meant dollars.”

  He immediately set out to change the conditions that allowed the Bennett, Hearst, Pulitzer, and their imitators to flourish. He was the first publisher to solicit subscriptions via telephone. He offered contests to his salesman. He gave them quotas and goals for the number of subscribers they were expected to bring in.

  He understood that people bought the yellow papers because they were cheap—and they didn’t have any other options. He felt that if they had a choice, they’d pick something better. He intended to be that option. First, he would match his competitors’ prices, and then he would deliver a paper that far surpassed the value implied by the low price.

  It worked. When he dropped the price of the Times to one cent, circulation tripled in the first year. He would compete on content. He came up with the phrase “All the News That’s Fit to Print” as a mission statement for the editorial staff, two months after taking over the paper. The less known runner-up says almost as much: “All the World’s News, But Not a School for Scandal.”

  I don’t want to exaggerate. The transition to a stable press was by no means immediate, and it didn’t immediately transform the competition. But s
ubscription did set forth new conditions in which the newspaper and the newspaperman had incentives more closely aligned with the needs of their readers. The end of that wave of journalism meant that papers were sold to readers by subscriptions, and all the ills of yellow journalism have swift repercussions in a subscription model: Readers who are misled unsubscribe; errors must be corrected in the following day’s issue; and the needs of the newsboys no longer drove the daily headlines.

  A subscription model—whether it’s music or news—offers necessary subsidies to the nuance that is lacking in the kind of stories that flourish in one-off distribution. Opposing views can now be included. Uncertainty can be acknowledged. Humanity can be allowed. Since articles don’t have to spread on their own, but rather as part of the unit (the whole newspaper or album or collection), publishers do not need to exploit valence to drive single-use buyers.

  With Ochs’s move, reputation began to matter more than notoriety. Reporters started social clubs, where they critiqued one another’s work. Some began talk of unionizing. Mainly they began to see journalism as a profession, and from this they developed rules and codes of conduct. The professionalization of journalism meant applying new ideas to how stories were found, written, and presented. For the first time, it created a sense of obligation, not just to the paper and circulation, but also to the audience.

  Just as Bennett had his imitators, so did Ochs. In fact, the press has imitated the principles he built into the New York Times since he took it over. Even now, when someone buys a paper at a newsstand, they don’t survey the headlines and buy the most sensational. They buy the paper they trust—the same goes for what radio stations they listen to and television news they watch. This is the subscription model, the brand model, invented by Ochs, internalized. It is selling on subscription and not by the story.