Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (21 page)

THEIR METRICS, YOUR ADVANTAGE

What gets measured gets managed, or so the saying goes. So what do publishers measure? Out of everything that can possibly be measured, blogs have picked a handful of the most straightforward and cost-effective metrics to rely on (wonderfulness is not one of them). They choose to measure only what can be clearly communicated to their writers as goals. Like officers in Vietnam ordered to report body counts back to Washington as indicators of success or failure, these ill-conceived metrics—based on simplicity more than anything else—make bloggers do awful things.

To understand bloggers, rephrase the saying as: “Simplistic measurements matter.” Like, did a shitload of people see it? Must be good. Was there a raging comments section going? Awesome! Did the story get picked up on
Gawker
? It made the
Drudge Report
? Yes! In practice, this is all blogs really have time to look for, and it’s easy to give it to them.

I exploit these pseudo-metrics all the time. If other blogs have covered something, competitors rush to copy them, because they assume there is traffic in it. As a result, getting coverage on one site can simply be a matter of sending those links to an unoriginal blogger. That those links were scored under false pretenses hardly matters. How could anyone tell? Showing that a story you want written is connected to a popular or search engine–friendly topic (preferably one the site already has posts about) does the same thing. However tenuous the connection, it satisfies the pageview impulse and gives the blogger excuse to send readers to their stories. You’ve done something that gets them paid.

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?

Once your story has gotten coverage, 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 StumbleUpon and Outbrain, one hundred dollars means a rush of one thousand people or more—illusory confirmations to the blogger that you are newsworthy. The stat counters on these sites make no distinctions 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] 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 and for unthinking writers to fall for it. They are looking to eat. They know what key words 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.

Metrics and measurements are a comfort to publishers. It takes the uncertainty out of their business. What can’t be measured—or requires true editorial judgment—is scary and requires financial risk.

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 Facebook photo album. 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 began to test the waters by posting deliberately inflammatory comments. Why write this way? his sister asked. Peter replied: “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 won’t 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 one, 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, Huffington Post published 161
paid
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
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.