Understanding Blog "Content" On The Internet

This is the first of a DOTE three-part series about the internet. I will post Part II on Wednesday — Dave

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I recently read Ryan Holiday's Trust Me I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. Young Ryan is a sharp cookie, a person who has excellent insights into how blogs on the internet actually work because he has worked on the inside manipulating the system for profit (video below). While his book did not change my fundamental understanding of how blog "content" shows up on the internet, it did deepen and broaden that understanding. This post is not a review of Holiday's book, but rather an explanation based on it. Specifically, we are trying to answer the questions—

Where does all the astonishing bullshit we find on the internet come from? Why is it there?

To get the answers, we must understand the business model of the most popular "content-based" websites (blogs). For Holiday, all web sites featuring content are called "blogs" and I shall follow that usage. Although Holiday didn't define a category for the most popular blogs, I find it convenient to call them Sensational Content Mills (SCMs). These blogs get many, many hundreds of thousands or millions of pageviews every day. (DOTE gets about 1,550 pageviews per day during the work week.)

Here is a short (and incomplete) list of some of the most popular contemporary blogs. This list does not include mainstream media sites like the New York Times and its associated blogs, CNN and its blogs, or Yahoo and its blogs.

• The Huffington Post
• The Atlantic (magazine)
• The Daily Beast
• Politico
• Business Insider
• The New Yorker (magazine)
• Gawker
• Salon
• Buzzfeed
• The Drudge Report
• Zerohedge
• Slate

That list should give you a pretty good idea about who the SCMs are. And here's their business model.

You can find a good definitons of ad impressions here.

In order to get this vicious cycle going, SCMs must first get your attention. Constantly, over and over again. In order to do that, these "content" sites publish a neverending stream of nonsense specifically designed to attract pageviews (from you). Holiday calls this "fake news", and indeed, much of it is simply made up, or it's simple rumor mongering, or it is yet another attempt to stir up the pot, or some similar phoniness. All of this "content" is published to attract your attention, to get you to click on ads, and generate revenues for the website in question.

Holiday has a saying which he tells his clients—may becomes is becomes has. A specific example will suffice to show how this works. I chose Is Jon Stewart Turning Off His Fan Base?, which was published by Salon on Saturday, January 19, 2013. This story represents the early stages of Holiday's rule.

Jon Stewart is known among his fans for speaking truth to power — see his dismantling of the CNN show “Crossfire,” for instance, or his criticism of President George W. Bush and the “Mess O’Potamia” in Iraq on The Daily Show. However, his recent work may have turned some liberals against him.

OK, that's the hook. (Ignore the ridiculous "truth to power" statement.) Is there is a shred of evidence that Stewart's recent "work" has turned "some liberals" against him? Actually, there is some flimsy evidence that some liberal bloggers are pissed off at Stewart. Note that a few liberal bloggers do not constitute Jon Stewart's Comedy Channel fan base as the post's title suggests.

Stewart defended present-day cinema punching bag “Zero Dark Thirty” as having not been made in cooperation with the government and said the torture it depicts is “difficult,” raising the ire of liberals across the blogosphere. (Andrew Sullivan wrote that “this subject is too important for equivocation or the ‘I’m just a comedian’ cop-out.”)

Damning evidence—a conservative blogger (Sullivan of the SCM The Daily Beast) is supporting Stewart (see below). Do you see how the SCMs feed off each other? This tempest in a teapot has its own self-sustaining momentum. Moreover, Zero Dark Thirty is not really "the issue" here, although this vacuous nonsense serves to promote the movie.

Then came Stewart’s smug dismissal of the “trillion-dollar coin” idea floated in order to stop the debate debacle in Congress. While the idea was not tenable for many reasons (including optics), Stewart’s open mockery and suggestion of alternatives got him in hot water with Paul Krugman, the Nobel-winning economist and New York Times columnist.

“Stewart seems weirdly unaware that there’s more to fiscal policy than balancing the budget,” wrote Krugman. “But in this case, he also seems unaware that the president can’t just decide unilaterally to spend 40 percent less.”

The entire "story" actually hinges on the fact that Stewart ridiculed the "trillion dollar coin" spending ceiling fix, which is surely one of the goofiest ideas the humans have stumbled upon lately. That story had its own momentum, but the idea pretty much died when Obama and Geithner rejected it, so it's time to spin things a different way to keep those pageviews coming.

(The trillion dollar coin was so goofy that even a moron like Jon Strewart could see how goofy it was. In this respect, he's a lot smarter than Paul Krugman. But I digress.)

And of course, Jon Stewart struck back at Krugman in order to keep the bullshit flowing (video below).

Now we get some enraged liberal bloggers (aside from Krugman) who think Stewart is uninformed about fiscal policy because he ridiculed the trillion dollar coin. Here's one—

Jonathan Chait at New York magazine wrote that the Comedy Central host “flunks econ” and is operating under a premise about economics that was “completely uninformed.” Chait told Salon that he generally agrees with Stewart’s arguments but that the host’s “homespun Hooverism” tends to “dovetail a little bit with elite moderate liberal sentiment. Keynesian economics is not intuitive”...

And here's another—

Leslie Savan, a blogger for The Nation, has long taken issue with Stewart’s equivalency between two sides, citing the 2010 Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, which equally criticized activists on the far right (including birthers) and the far left (including groups like CODEPINK, who called George W. Bush a war criminal). “He’s so stuck on tone,” said Savan. “If somebody looks silly, it’s like waving a cape before his comic bull. And, in a way, that came out in this thing with the coin — ‘what a silly, crazy, nutty idea.’ But it was sane compared to what could happen if the House Republicans don’t raise the debt ceiling”...

There follows a "serious analysis" of all this bullshit, and the Salon post finishes up like this—

Indeed, Stewart will always have his fan base, and it’s not just made up of liberals. After opening the floor to commenters who took a less dim view of Stewart’s remarks on “Zero Dark Thirty,” Andrew Sullivan emailed Salon: “I don’t consider myself a liberal critic of Stewart; I consider myself a conservative admirer.”

That's the final damning comment—praise for Stewart from conservative cretin Andrew Sullivan of the Sensational Content Mill The Daily Beast.

This phony brouhaha is of course an argument among morons, but if you think that's all it is, you've missed the point. All of this contentious back & forth has a point—to make money for all the businesses involved, including Salon, The New York Times (via Krugman), The Daily Beast, The Comedy Channel, and, more peripherally, The Nation and New York Magazine.

In a single web post, I can not possibly cover all the disparate sources of bullshit on the internet, but Sensational Content Mills are responsible for a great deal of it. So the next time you run across some unbelievable bullshit on the internet, bear in mind that this bullshit actually serves a purpose—to make money for those who own the writers who purvey it. (Bloggers are often grossly underpaid wage slaves; sometimes they are like salesmen on commission who are paid by the pageview.)

And in America, that's the main purpose of most of the bullshit you read or see.

Bonus Videos — First we have Jon Stewart's response to Krugman, and then the book trailer for Ryan Holiday's Trust Me, I'm Lying. You might also watch this longer interview with Holiday.

 

 

Comments

[Jim]

Hi Dave,

I agree with a lot of what you write, including this but why include ZeroHedge? I think you're wrong about that site, I don't see any of the things you are talking about on ZH. It's a great source of information.

[Dave Cohen]

@Jim,

Well, friend, I guess that means the joke's on you

Please, everybody, go over to Zerohedge and look at what's there today.

http://www.zerohedge.com/

And don't forget to check this out--

http://www.freewebsitereport.org/www.zerohedge.com

Or forget to look at (and click on?) all the ads on the Zerohedge homepage.

-- Dave

[Jim]

Jim is Jim, presumably, but is not me, so now that's out of the way, this phenomenon is really what's happened with sensationlist media since the early rags of New York. The 'content' is actually the ads, and it always has been. The 'news' is the bait. Television has always followed the same format.

The internet amplifies it, and there are some really ridiculous examples of it. Unforunately, most of the major media sources have seen that sites like the Daily Beast have a more successful revenue-generating format, so they're pretty much all moving to the sensationlist side.

It's adding dramatically to the confusion between reality and fiction taking place in our culture. There are so many conspiracy theories, or stories about what Kim Kardashian wore in Cannes, or hyper-partisan editorial slants now that the heads spins. Just always cross check from multiple sources, and never click on the ads.

[Dave Cohen]

I guess we shall have to distinguish between Jim #1 and Jim #2.

As above, we shall do so by what the two Jims say.

-- Dave

[J. Drew]

Some people say "bad news sells", but in case you haven't noticed, those people are wrong. The truth is that bad news is easier base sensational news stories around, and that's what really sells.

[John D]

You are so right Dave. I don't know how many times I've clicked on an interesting headline only to ask myself after 'why did I waste ten seconds of my life on that?'

[Peter]

That's what's missing on DOTE-ads! I knew there was a reason I don't see links to you on the SCM's I visit! Dave, you're missing out on 'what's happening'!

Reminds me of one of the best books I've read: Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves To Death: Television in the Age of Public Discourse". If he was alive today, he'd be astonished by the depraved state of our world.

[Brian]

So, basically, this is the same advertising model (and media "subscription" model) that has more or less always existed since long before Hearst sensationalized (started?) wars to increase circulation.

I presume this has been going on since humans decided other humans had something of value...

Naked fan dancing gets them in the door. Then, take their gold (or whatever) by sales or fees or con or theft. Kick back a little to the fan dancer.

Same game. Different outfit.

Best analytical advice ever given... follow the money.

I look forward to the next pieces of your series.

[J. Drew]

Checked out that Freewebsite report website, that's pretty cool. For zerohedge to be pulling in that kind of cash there must be more lowbrow day-trader doomers than I'd imagined possible. I do wonder how accurate their figures are though. Does DOTE really rake in a big $3.10 a day in advertising revenue? That Seems like an awful lot.

[Alexander Ač]

Well, and then we have prez Obama talking about climate change (he is in 2nd term, so now he as allowed to): http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-ZC_y78W4t4 - so presumably, this is not "blog" and actually will help for a "common good". Or not.

Alex