by Ryan Holiday
ENTER : THE MANIPULATOR
Bloggers eager to build names and publishers eager to sell their blogs are like two crooked businessmen colluding to create interest in a bogus investment opportunity—building up buzz and clearing town before anyone gets wise. In this world, where the rules and ethics are lax, a third player can exert massive influence. Enter: the media manipulator.
The assumptions of blogs and their owners present obvious vulnerabilities that people like me exploit. They allow us to control what is in the media, because the media is too busy chasing profits to bother trying to stop us. They are not motivated to care. Their loyalty is not to their audience but to themselves and their con. While ultimately this is reason to despair, I have found one small solace: Conning the conmen is one of life’s most satisfying pleasures. And it’s not even hard.
In the next chapters I will outline how to do this and how it is being done. I have broken down the manipulation of blogs into nine effective tactics. Each exposes a pathetic vulnerability in our media system—each, when wielded properly, levels the playing field and gives you free rein to control the flow of information on the web.
*Exclusives, as they are called, are important for another reason. Advertising a story as an exclusive by extension takes a dig at a publication’s competitors: “We got this story and they didn’t—because we’re better.” This is partly why a site would rather post a weak exclusive on its front page than a more interesting story they’ve been forced to share with others.
*Arrington’s longer argument is that since he and other bloggers disclose their conflicts of interest, they are in the clear. The science behind the 2012 book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty by Dan Ariely disputes this notion, shows, in fact, that disclosing conflicts of interests actually increases the bias of skewed data. We are just not good at tossing tainted info.
IV
TACTIC #1
THE ART OF THE BRIBE
The writings by which one can live are not the writings which themselves live, and are never those in which the writer does his best. . . . Those who have to support themselves by their pen must depend on literary drudgery, or at best on writings addressed to the multitude.
—JOHN STUART MILL, AUTOBIOGRAPHY
THERE ARE MANY WAYS TO GIVE SOMEONE A BRIBE. Very rarely does it mean handing them a stack of bills.
The criteria that bloggers’ employers use to determine the size of their paychecks—the stuff bloggers are paid for—can be co-opted and turned into an indirect bribe. These levers were easy enough for me to find, and properly identified and wielded, they turned out to be as effective as any overt payoff.
It begins with how these bloggers are hired. Put aside any notion that applicants are chosen based on skill, integrity, or a love of their craft. Ben Parr, editor at large at the popular technology blog Mashable, was once asked what he looked for when he hired writers for his blogs. His answer was one word: quickness. “Online journalism is fast-paced,” he explained. “We need people that can get the story out in minutes and can compose the bigger opinion pieces in a couple of hours, not a couple of days.” As to any actual experience in journalism, that would be considered only “a definite plus.”1
The payment structure of blogging reflects this emphasis on speed over other variables, such as quality, accuracy, or how informative the content might be. Early on blogs tended to pay their writers a rate per post or a flat rate with a minimum number of posts required per day. Engadget, Slashfood, Autoblog, and other sites run by Weblogs, Inc. paid bloggers a reported five hundred dollars a month in 2005 for 125 posts—or four dollars a post, four per day.2 Gawker paid writers twelve dollars a post as late as 2008. And of course these rates don’t include the other duties bloggers are stuck with, such as editing, responding to e-mails, and writing comments. Professional blogging is done in the boiler room, and it is brutal.
Gawker set the curve for the industry again when they left the pay-per-post model and switched to a pageview-based compensation system that gave bonuses to writers based on their monthly traffic figures. These bonuses came on top of a set monthly pay, meaning that bloggers were eligible for payments that could effectively double their salary once they hit their monthly quota. You can imagine what kind of results this led to. I recall a post from a Gawker writer whining about how he didn’t know how much money he’d make that month—and getting seventeen thousand views for it.
The bonus system was so immediately rewarding for Gawker bloggers that the company tweaked their ratio to deemphasize the bonus slightly. The system remains, however, and today the company has a big board in its offices that shows the stats for all the writers and their stories. When writers aren’t fighting for bonuses, all they have to do is look up to be reminded: If you’re at the bottom of the board, you might get fired.
This is now the standard model for blogs. Seeking Alpha, a network of financial writers (arguably worth a lot to its investor-type readers), launched a payment platform in 2010 that pays writers based on the traffic their posts generate. The average payment per article turned out to be only fifty-eight dollars for the first six months. A writer needs to rack up roughly one hundred thousand views to make even one thousand dollars—a tough fight when you’re jostling for share of voice against the thousand-plus writers who publish there each month. The blog The Awl announced it would also start paying its writers using a similar model two years after its founding. A dozen or so bloggers split a small pool of revenue generated by advertisements on the site. The more traffic the site does, the larger the pool. It’s the same incentive—desperately dependent on big hits—but instead of fighting each other for pageviews, they’re all in on the hustle together.3
Many outlets have also built out what they call “contributor programs,” which open up previously exclusive outlets to freelance writers who are paid by the view or by how many social media shares their articles get (as an approximation of pageviews). A story from a Forbes.com contributor, for instance, is written not by a Forbes staffer but by someone hustling to get as many clicks as possible. I don’t necessarily think that contributor programs are all bad—I’ve helped several major publications build them out—but I do think the public needs to be more informed about the difference between these styles of content. You might think you’re reading an article written by a professional journalist when, in reality, you are reading something written by someone who is paid so little for what they wrote that they can be a target for real bribes from the subject of their story (as has happened at contributor-heavy online publications like Forbes.com).
Here’s an e-mail I just got, offering to buy links in articles I contribute to Entrepreneur.com (another site with such a program):
Hi Ryan,
I’ve been following your writing on Entrepreneur for some time now, I hope you don’t mind me dropping you a quick email.
My name is Gareth, I am a London based, Digital PR Consultant. I work with credible clients offering them a ‘media mention’ service on the publications you write for.
We work with our clients to create natural informative content (e.g. blog posts, infographics) that would be of value to your upcoming articles in order to place them with a link back to their site.
We can also provide interesting and relevant quotes from the CEO or senior employees at our partners business to add value to your articles.
Please remember, We only offer you links that add value to your articles, and we pay promptly for each link that is placed.
Just reply to this email and I’d be happy to discuss the remuneration involved and get you started,
Thanks and have a great day, Gareth
It’s almost as if he thinks the euphemisms will cover up the fact that this is an SEO payola scheme.* I’m not in a position where I would ever need to accept an offer like that, but you can see how many bloggers would be—and their editors and publishers would likely never know.
To give you a sense of the numbers, Henry Blodget, the founder
of Business Insider, once explained that his writers need to generate three times the number of pageviews required to pay for their own salary and benefits, as well as a share of the overhead, sales, hosting, and Blodget’s cut, to be worth hiring. In other words, an employee making sixty thousand dollars a year would need to produce upward of 1.8 million page views a month, every month, or they’re out.4 This is no easy task. I’d argue it’s getting harder over time as people get better at getting traffic and flood the market with inventory.
YouTubers face similarly tough economics. YouTube sells and serves the ads, takes a substantial cut, and passes the rest to the creator. Most of these figures are not public, but a decent account can hope to make about one dollar for every thousand views (less than one penny per click). I remember working with the very popular multiplatinum rock band Linkin Park and realizing their account, which had done over one hundred million views at that time, would earn them barely six figures—to be split among six guys, a manager, a lawyer, and a record label. These kinds of rates force channels big and small to churn out videos constantly to make money. Every view is only a penny in their pocket.
Social media influencers are straight-up mercenary. Through various ad networks you can actually pay influential accounts to post prewritten messages or endorse products.
In order to promote one of Tucker’s books, I got a Twitter account with more than four hundred thousand followers to say: “FACT: People will do anything for money”—for twenty-five dollars. For a few hundred dollars more I tricked dozens of other accounts into posting humiliating promotional messages that pushed the book to a number two debut on the New York Times bestseller list. One blog headline summed it up well: TUCKER MAX PROVES YOU CAN PAY CELEBRITIES TO TWEET WHATEVER YOU WANT.5 It occurs to me now that sponsored tweets (and Instagram posts and Snapchat stories) would be a very easy way to propagate conspiracy theories or fringe ideas.* Is there any easier way to legitimize an idea than to have it repeated? And here celebrities are, willing to do that at a couple dollars a pop.
If all these numbers sound small—and they do to me—it isn’t simply because bloggers are getting shafted. It’s because what they produce isn’t worth all that much. Political analyst Nate Silver once estimated that the median user-contributed article on the Huffington Post was worth only three dollars in revenue to the company.6 So even if they were paid fairly for their contributions, it wouldn’t be much of a paycheck. Silver looked at high-profile articles by former U.S. secretary of labor Robert Reich that did 547 comments and 27,000 pageviews and concluded that they’d be worth only about two hundred dollars—an amount for which a man like that usually wouldn’t get out of bed. Most articles from the currently unpaid contributors generate significantly less revenue than that.
RIPE FOR EXPLOITATION
All this means that if bloggers want to get rich—or even cover their rent—they’ve got to find other ways to get paid. That’s where people like me come in—with boatloads of free stuff.
One of the quickest ways to get coverage for a product online is to give it away for free to bloggers (they’ll rarely disclose their conflict of interest). At American Apparel I had two full-time employees whose job was to research fashion bloggers—girls who post photos of their outfits each day to thousands of readers who imitate them—and send them our newest garments. I would offer an affiliate ad deal to the most popular girls that would pay them a commission each time someone bought something from our site after seeing their photos. I’m sure you’re shocked to read how often their posts featured something from American Apparel.
When I promoted movies, tours of the set or invitations to the premiere worked wonders in getting blog coverage. When I worked with bands, concert tickets, or even just an e-mail from the artist, could make most bloggers starstruck enough to give me what I needed. And that’s nothing compared to what Samsung did: As an advertiser on Business Insider, Samsung paid for a Business Insider staffer to go to Barcelona to cover the Mobile World Congress. Thankfully, the writer disclosed this relationship. But in that very disclosure, he copped to feeling “pretty warm and fuzzy about Samsung” as a result of the generous offer. For marketers, it’s all about encouraging those feelings however possible.7
But this is just free swag and perks. The easiest way for bloggers to make real money is to transition to a job with an old media company or a tech company. They can build a name and sell it to a sucker, just like their owners and investors are trying to do. Once a blogger builds a personal brand—through scoops or controversy or major stories—they can expect a cushy job at a magazine or start-up desperate for the credibility and buzz that these attributes offer. These lagging companies can then tell shareholders, “See, we’re current!” or “We’re turning things around!”
This revolving door has a peculiar influence on coverage, as is to be expected. What blogger is going to do real reporting on companies like Google, Facebook, or Twitter when there is the potential for a lucrative job down the road? What writer is going to burn a source if they view their job as a networking play?
For my part, I’ve lost track of the bloggers whose names I have helped make by giving them big stories (favorable and to my liking) and watched transition into bigger gigs at magazines, newspapers, and editorships at major blogs. In fact, the other day I was driving in Los Angeles and noticed a billboard on La Cienega Boulevard with nothing but a large face on it: the face of a video blogger who I’d started giving free clothes to back when his videos did a few thousand views apiece. Now his videos do millions of views, and he has a show on HBO. If you invest early in a blogger, you can buy your influence very cheaply.
In most cases, they know what I am doing and don’t care. If blog publishers are constantly looking for an exit, then their bloggers are too. They both want money from the same big media companies. They don’t care if the scandals they write about are real or made up, or if their sources are biased or self-serving—as long as the blogger gets something out of it.
THE REAL CONFLICT OF INTEREST
We take it as self-evident that journalists shouldn’t be paid off by people they write about or have financial investments (like owning a stock they’re reporting on) in their field. The conflict would shape the coverage and corrupt their writing. So for a second I was pleasantly surprised to read pretty much that exact sentiment in a post by former Gawker writer Hamilton Nolan titled “New Rules for Media Ethics.” He said it plainly: “Media people—reporter, commentator, or otherwise—shouldn’t have a financial stake in what they’re reporting on.”
But then I realized how hypocritical it all was, since Nolan is being paid by how many views his posts do. His financial interest isn’t in what he writes about but in how he writes. In the pay-per-pageview model, every post is a conflict of interest.
Take this Vice piece, “Why Texas Can’t Seem to Fall in Love with In-N-Out Burger,” which from the headline is making a sweeping, seemingly verifiable claim—that Texans are rejecting the West Coast burger chain. But upon reading the article you find that the actual evidence for such a claim is . . . that the In-N-Out locations in Texas have a sub-four-star rating on Yelp. Seriously. That’s it!* The reporter is exaggerating a claim with little validity—because that’s where the traffic is. He doesn’t care about In-N-Out’s stock price. He cares about his own stock in that story. And later, when a financial reporter sees a potential angle in reporting on the decline of the once-great private company, he can say, “Last year, Vice reported that . . .” and on and on and on.
I’ve never had to buy influence directly, but you can see how craven writers like that are easily corruptible. It’s not a far walk from flimsy story to fake story.
To their credit, most sites explicitly forbid the kind of payola as best they can. Others allow it. Medium.com, a platform I love, is really a site made up of many different channels. Those channels are allowed to sell access and articles to willing buyers. I know this because after getting one of these offers, I e-mailed
an editor at Medium to report the corruption and was told such deals are considered aboveboard.
“There’s no difference,” philosopher and provocateur Nassim Taleb said, “between a journalist at The Guardian and the restaurant owner in Milan, who, when you ask for a taxi, calls his cousin who does a tour of the city to inflate the meter before showing up. Or the doctor who willfully misdiagnoses you to sell you a drug in which he has a vested interest.” Most corruption is not obvious. The incentive for bloggers to write bigger, to write simpler, to write more controversially or, conversely, more favorably, to not waste time or resources on research or fact-checking, to write more often than is warranted because it will get them the traffic they need, is hard to spot, but it is there. And it is warping what you see and hear—and what is written about you and your friends when they find themselves in the spotlight.
Writing online is often called a “digital sweatshop” for good reason.* “Ceaseless fight for table scraps” might be another phrase for it. Or in the immortal words of Henry Kissinger: The reason the knives are so sharp online is because the pie is so small.
*Here’s another one, sent to me a few days later by someone named Billy Smith who runs a site called CheckCorner.com: “I would love to get a mention on The Next Web or any other website that you write for. I am open to negotiation and would be willing to do either a sponsored post or pay you for the mention.”
*Or to sell expensive tickets to a half-baked, half-planned concert and call it Fyre Festival!
*I tweeted at the writer when I saw it: “I’m curious on the data that Texas isn’t embracing In N Out other than it doesn’t have 5*s on Yelp. That seems like a reach?” He replied: “I was drawing off my experience of living in Texas around the time In-N-Out opened and the conversations I would have with people about it.” In other words, it was based on nothing.
