Trust Me I'm Lying (5th Anniversary Edition)

by Ryan Holiday

  Remember, some bloggers have to churn out as many as a dozen posts a day. That’s not because twelve is some lucky number but because they need to meet serious pageview goals for the site. Not every story is intended to be a home run—a collection of singles, doubles, and triples adds up too. Pageview journalism is about scale. Sites have to publish multiple stories every few minutes to make a profit, and why shouldn’t your story be one of them?

  Per the leaderboard strategy I mentioned earlier, one of the best ways to turn yourself into a favorite and regular subject is to make it clear your story is a reliable traffic draw. If you’re a brand, then post the story to your company Twitter and Facebook accounts and put it on your website. This inflates the stats in your favor and encourages more coverage down the road. There are also services that allow you to “buy traffic,” sending thousands of visitors to a specific page. At the penny-per-click rates of Stumble Upon or even cheaper traffic from places like Fiverr.com, a few hundred bucks can mean thousands of pageviews—illusory confirmation to the media that you are news-worthy. The stat counters on these sites make no distinction between fake and real views, nor does anyone care enough to dig deep into the sources of traffic. The lure of the indirect bribe is all that matters.

  But be careful: This beast can bite you back if it feels like it. Once sites see there is traffic in something, they do not stop—often falling to new lows in the process. Companies enjoy the spotlight at first, until the good news runs out and the blog begins to rely on increasingly spurious sources to keep the high-traffic topic on their pages. What begins as positive press often ends in the fabrication of scandals or utter bullshit. As Brandon Mendelson wrote for Forbes, the lure of pageviews takes blogs to places they otherwise never should have gone:

  A couple of years ago, I quit blogging for Mashable after they had posted the suicide note to the guy who flew a helicopter into a government building in Texas. Pete’s [the publisher’s] response to me quitting over the suicide note was, pretty much, “Other blogs were doing it.” He never explained why a Web / Tech / Social Media guide would post a crazy person’s suicide note.

  Who wants to say “I did it for the page views” out loud?3

  The answer to that question is “almost every blogger.”

  Why do you think the Huffington Post once ran a front-page story about what time the Super Bowl would start? The query was a popular one on game day, and the post generated incredible amounts of traffic. It may have been a pointless story for a political and news blog like the Huffington Post to write, but the algorithm justified it—along with the rest of their “the world is round” stories and well-timed celebrity slideshows.

  This content is attractive to blogs because the traffic it does is both measurable and predictable. Like a fish lure, it is not difficult to mimic the appearance of these kinds of stories or for unthinking writers to fall for it. They are looking to eat. They know what keywords are lucrative, what topics get links, and what type of writing gets comments, and they’ll bite without asking themselves whether the version of events you’ve presented is just a barbed trick.

  Nick Denton would tell me recently that he dislikes this criticism of pageviews. “Saying pageviews are wicked is like saying calories are wicked,” he said. There is some truth to that. But don’t most people agree that this is a real problem—in a world where obesity is a major health crisis—with the way that companies manipulate the public to consume more and more calories?

  It would be alarming to know that McDonald’s judged its managers based on how many calories they were able to shove down the gullet of their customers. Or to hear the CEO brag about how they squeezed an extra 200 calories into a Big Mac at little to no cost to the company. Well, that is precisely the kind of thinking that publishers do today—the exact same publishers who would jump to criticize similar corruptive metrics if used by other metrics. They don’t like thinking that their business is as exploitative as any other, but that doesn’t make it less true.

  CAN’T STAND THE SILENCE

  “I posted something but nobody responded. What does it mean?” It’s a question you’ve probably asked yourself after nobody liked the Facebook status with your big news, or no friends commented on your new Instagram photo. Maybe you thought that tweet you wrote was hilarious, and you’re not sure why it wasn’t retweeted—not even once. This innocent little question is just about hurt feelings for you, but for pageview-hungry publishers, it’s what keeps them up at night.

  Early Usenet users called this Warnock’s Dilemma, after its originator, Bryan Warnock. The dilemma began with mailing lists but now applies to message boards (why is no one responding to the thread?), blogs (why hasn’t anyone commented?), and websites (why isn’t this generating any chatter?). The answer to any of these questions could just as easily be satisfaction as apathy, and publishers want to know which it is.

  This dilemma was actually predicted by Orson Scott Card in the 1985 book Ender’s Game. Peter Wiggin creates the online persona of a demagogue named Locke and begins to test the waters by posting deliberately inflammatory comments. Why write this way? his sister asks. Peter replies: “We can’t hear how our style of writing is working unless we get responses—and if we’re bland, no one will answer.”

  Card understood that it is incredibly difficult to interpret silence in a constructive way. Warnock’s Dilemma, for its part, poses several interpretations:

  1. The post is correct, well-written information that needs no follow-up commentary. There’s nothing more to say except “Yeah, what he said.”

  2. The post is complete and utter nonsense, and no one wants to waste the energy or bandwidth to even point this out.

  3. No one read the post, for whatever reason.

  4. No one understood the post but no one will ask for clarification, for whatever reason.

  5. No one cares about the post, for whatever reason.4

  If you’re a publisher, this checklist causes more headaches than it cures. It’s all bad. Possibility number one is unprofitable: We know that practical utility doesn’t spread, and posts that don’t generate follow-up commentary are dead in the link economy. Possibility number two is embarrassing and damaging to the brand. Possibility number three is bad for obvious reasons. Possibility number four means the post was probably too ambitious, too academic, and too certain for anyone to risk questions. Possibility number five means somebody chose the wrong topic.

  Whatever the cause, the silence all means the same thing: no comments, no links, no traffic, no money. It lands the publisher firmly in a territory labeled “utterly unprofitable.” Jonah Peretti, for his part, has his bloggers at BuzzFeed track their failures closely. If news doesn’t go viral or get feedback, then the news needs to be changed. If news does go viral, it means the story was a success—whether or not it was accurate, in good taste, or done well.

  That is where the opportunity lies: Blogs are so afraid of silence that the flimsiest of evidence can confirm they’re on the right track. You can provide this by leaving fake comments to articles about you or your company from blocked IP addresses—good and bad to make it clear that there is a hot debate. Send fake e-mails to the reporter, positive and negative. This rare kind of feedback cements the impression that you or your company make for high-valence material, and the blog should be covering you. Like Peter Wiggin, publishers don’t care what they say as long as it isn’t bland or ignored. But by avoiding the bad kind of silence prompted by poor content, they avoid the good kind that results from the type of writing that makes people think but not say, Yeah, what he said. I’m glad I read this article.

  Professional bloggers understand this dilemma far better than the casual or amateur ones, according to an analysis done by Nate Silver of unpaid versus paid articles on the Huffington Post. Over a three-day period, 143 political posts by amateurs received 6,084 comments, or an average of just 43 comments per article (meaning that many got zero). Over that same period, the Huffington Post published 161 p
aid political articles (bought from other sites, written by staff writers, or other copyrighted content) that accumulated more than 133,000 comments combined. That amounts to more than 800 per article, or twenty times what the unpaid bloggers were able to accomplish.5

  According to the Huffington Post’s pageview strategy, the paid articles are indisputably better, because they generated more comments and traffic (like a 2009 article about the Iranian protests that got 96,281 comments). In a sane system, a political article that generated thousands of comments would be an indicator that something went wrong. It means the conversation descended into an unproductive debate about abortion or immigration, or devolved into mere complaining. But in the broken world of the web, it is the mark of a professional.

  A blog like the Huffington Post is not going to pay for something that is met with silence, even the good kind. They’re certainly not going to promote it or display it on the front page, since it would reduce the opportunity to generate pageviews. The Huffington Post does not wish to be the definitive account of a story or inform people—since the reaction to that is simple satisfaction. Blogs deliberately do not want to help.

  You’re basically asking for favors if you try to get blogs to cover something that isn’t going to drive pageviews and isn’t going to garner clear responses. Blogs are not in the business of doing favors—even if all you’re asking is for them to print the truth. Trust me, I have tried. I have shown them factories of workers whose jobs are at risk because of inaccurate online coverage. I have begged them to be fair for these poor people’s sake. If that didn’t make a difference, nothing will.

  BREAKING THE NEWS

  I don’t know if blogs enjoy being tricked. All I know is that they don’t care enough to put a stop to it. The response to sketchy anonymous tips, in my experience, is “Thanks,” a lot more often than “Prove you’re legit.”

  Nobody is fooling anyone. That’s not the game—because sites don’t have any interest in what they post, as long as it delivers pageviews. Samuel Axon, formerly an editor at Mashable and Engadget, complained that the rules by which blogs get “traffic, high impressions, and strong ad revenues betray journalists and the people who need them at every turn.” This is only partially true. They betray the ethical journalists and earnest readers. As far as bloggers and publishers looking to get rich or manipulators eager to influence the news are concerned, the system is just fine.

  Pageview journalism puffs blogs up and fattens them on a steady diet of guaranteed traffic pullers of a mediocre variety that require little effort to produce. It pulls writers and publishers to the extremes, and only to the extremes—the shocking and the already known. Practicing pageview journalism means that a publisher never has to worry about seeing “(0) Comments” at the bottom of a post. With tight deadlines and tight margins, any understanding of the audience is helpful guidance. For marketers, this is refreshingly predictable.

  It just happens that this metric-driven understanding breaks the news. The cynicism is self-fulfilling and self-defeating; as the quip famously attributed to Henry Ford points out, if he’d listened to what his customers “said” they wanted, all “we’d have ended up with was a faster horse.”

  Pageview journalism treats people by what they appear to want—from data that is unrepresentative to say the least—and gives them this and only this until they have forgotten that there could be anything else. It takes the audience at their worst and makes them worse. And then, when criticized, publishers throw up their hands as if to say, “We wish people liked better stuff too,” as if they had nothing to do with it.

  Well, they do.

  XI

  TACTIC #8

  USE THE TECHNOLOGY AGAINST ITSELF

  Actions are constrained by income, time, imperfect memory and calculating capacities, and other limited resources, and also by the available opportunities in the economy and elsewhere. . . . Different constraints are decisive for different situations, but the most fundamental constraint is limited time.

  —GARY BECKER, NOBEL PRIZE–WINNING ECONOMIST

  SOMETIMES I SEE A PREPOSTEROUSLY INACCURATE blog post about a client (or myself) and I take it personally, thinking that it was malicious. Or I wonder why they didn’t just pick up the phone and call me to get the other side of the story. I occasionally catch myself complaining about sensational articles or crummy writing, and placing the blame on an editor or a writer. It’s hard for me to understand the impulse to reduce an important issue to a stupid quote or unfunny one-liner.

  This is an unproductive attitude. It forgets the structure and constraints of blogging as a medium and how these realities explain almost everything blogs do. Where there is little volition, there should be little bitterness or blame. Only understanding, as I have learned, can be turned to advantage.

  The way news is found online more or less determines what is found. The way the news must be presented—in order to meet the technical constraints of the medium and the demands of its readers—determines the news itself. It’s basically a cliché at this point, but that doesn’t change the fact that Marshall McLuhan was right: The medium is the message.

  Think about television. We’re all tired of the superficiality of cable news and its insistence on reducing important political issues into needless conflict between two annoying talking heads. But there’s a simple reason for this, as media critic Eric Alterman explained in Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy. TV is a visual medium, he said, so to ask the audience to think about something it cannot see would be suicide. If it were possible to put an abstract idea to film, producers would happily show that instead of pithy sound bites. But it isn’t, so conflict, talking heads, and B-roll footage are all you’ll get. The values of television, Alterman realized, behave like a dictator, exerting their rule over the kind of information that can be transmitted across the channels.

  Blogs aren’t any different. The way the medium works essentially predetermines what bloggers can publish and how exactly they must do it. Blogs are just as logical as the television producers Alterman criticized; it’s just a matter of understanding their unique logic.

  To know what the medium demands of bloggers is to be able to predict, and then co-opt, how they act.

  HEMMED IN ON ALL SIDES

  Why do blogs constantly chase new stories? Why do they update so much? Why are posts so short? A look at their development makes it clear: Bloggers don’t have a choice.

  Early bloggers, according to Scott Rosenberg in his book on the history of blogging, Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters, had to answer one important question: How do our readers know what’s new?

  To solve this, programmers first tried “New!” icons, but that didn’t work. It was too difficult to tell what the icons meant across many blogs—on one site “New!” might mean the latest thing published and on another it could be anything written within the last month. What they needed was a uniform way to organize the content that would be the same across the web. Tim Berners-Lee, one of the founders of the web, set a procedure in motion that would be copied by almost everyone after him: New stuff goes at the top.

  The reverse chronological order on one of the web’s first sites—called “stacking” by programmers—became the de facto standard for blogging. Because the web evolved through imitation and collaboration, most sites simply adopted the form of their predecessors and peers. Stacking developed as an implicit standard, and that has had extraordinary implications. When content is stacked, it sets a very clear emphasis on the present. For the blogger, the time stamp is like an expiration date. It also creates considerable pressure to be short and immediate.

  In 1996, three years before the word “blogger” was even invented, proto-blogger Justin Hall wrote to his readers at Links.net that he’d been criticized at a party for not posting enough, and for not putting his posts right on the front page. “Joey said he used to love my pages,” Hall wrote, “but now there’s too many layers to
my links. At Suck(.com) you get sucked in immediately, no layers to content.”1

  It’s really an illustrative moment, if you think about it. In one of the first data-stamped posts on a blog ever, Hall was already alluding to the pressures the medium was putting on content. His post was ninety-three words and basically a haiku. This was not a man of too many “layers.” But Suck.com had just sold for thirty thousand dollars, so who was Hall to argue? So he resolved to put “a little some-thin’ new” at the top of his website every single day.

  We can trace a straight line from this conversation in 1996 to the post-per-day minimums of blogs like Gizmodo and Engadget in 2005, and to today, when authors of guides like Blogger Bootcamp tell prospective bloggers that the experience of publishing more than twenty thousand blog posts taught them that “Rule #1” is “Always Be Blogging,” and that the best sites are “updated daily, if not hourly.”

  Since content is constantly expiring, and bloggers face the Sisyphean task of trying to keep their sites fresh, creating a newsworthy event out of nothing becomes a daily occurrence. The structure of blogging warps the perspective of everyone who exists in this space—why would a blogger spend much time on a post that will very shortly be pushed below view? Understandably, no one wants to be the fool who wasted his or her time working on something nobody read. The message is clear: The best way to get traffic is to publish as much as possible, as quickly as possible, and as simply as possible.

  The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging has a simple rule of thumb: Unless readers can see the end of your post coming around eight hundred words in, they’re going to stop. Scrolling is a pain, as is feeling like an article will never end. This gives writers around eight hundred words to make their point—a rather tight window. Even eight hundred words is pushing it, the Huffington Post says, since a block of text that big on the web can be intimidating. A smart blogger, they note, will break it up with graphics or photos, and definitely some links.