Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral
(Penguin Press, $30)
When journalism became a mad chase for online traffic early this century, “few of us really knew the rules,” said Dan Kois in Slate. Back around 2008, Gawker and BuzzFeed were at the vanguard of a revolution in which the winners were going to be the sites brash enough to grab the most eyeballs and the old guard was already playing catch-up. Ben Smith, who became the founding editor of BuzzFeed News in 2011, has now written a book that attempts to capture the rise and fall of that entire era through the experiences of Gawker honcho Nick Denton and BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and, honestly, “quite a bit of that story ends up in the book.” I was chasing traffic elsewhere when Denton and Peretti were riding high, and their core mistakes look familiar. As addictive as online traffic can be, its value remains elusive.
Smith casts Peretti and Denton as rival visionaries, said former Gawker editor
Max Read in The Washington Post. Peretti, who’d helped launch the Huffington Post, believed there was a science to crafting BuzzFeed posts that’d go viral. Denton bet on cutting wit as Gawker’s audience builder. Unfortunately, the rivalry “never really comes alive on the page.” Beyond that, the race Peretti and Denton were running now looks sad—“at best a brief, wacky interregnum between periods of sustained dominance by big national news publishers.” Gawker Media was sued into bankruptcy by an offended celebrity, while BuzzFeed is barely hanging on. Peretti learned the hard way that Facebook had more control over BuzzFeed’s traffic than he did.
Smith also now knows this, but the realization “seems to have come astonishingly late,” said Nathan Heller in The New Yorker. Facebook, which once had listened to Peretti when he suggested tweaks to its algorithm that boosted BuzzFeed’s readership, eventually reset its priorities. Other social platforms did the same. And while the resulting shift in revenue flows “turned out poorly for creative people,” Smith has found other work. He’s “a reporter of rare talent,” which makes his book instructive even when its perspective feels cloudy.