What Was Digital Media?

Ben Smith, Taylor Lorenz, and I debate the mediums and the messages of the 2010s internet

The story of digital media’s rise and fall is a tragic one. Long ago, there was the age of Walter Cronkite, the “most trusted man in America.” Then came social, which added millions of new voices into the news-making crowd. A wave of internet-first media companies, such as Vox, BuzzFeed, Gawker, and VICE, entered to overthrow the old guard. They were fueled by crazy venture capital valuations and a hip, counter-cultural new aesthetic.

But in the last few years, these publications fell one by one. Stock prices crashed; companies went bankrupt. Writers were hit by layoff after layoff. The winners stayed rich: Facebook, Fox News, The New York Times. Content production assumed a barbell shape, with masses of user-generated content on one end and the Times’s big-budget reporting on the other. Everything in the middle seemed to wither away.

Yet this is also the shift that has given so many a career—tweets and blogs and sponsored Instagram posts—platforms that don’t require unpaid internships and New York connections for people to put their stories out. As Martin Gurri chronicled in The Revolt of the Public and Alan Rusbridger in Breaking News, the end of one model meant the rise of another.

I invited journalists Ben Smith and Taylor Lorenz to talk about the last decade of digital media—how they saw it happen, and what might come next. ​Ben and Taylor are two of the savviest media thinkers I know: they’ve both been tenured reporters, but have also adapted their careers seamlessly to the age of Twitter, Substack, and the journalist-as-influencer.

​Ben, previously a media columnist at the Times and editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, is now running his own news venture, Semafor. Taylor is currently a technology columnist at The Washington Post after writing for the The New York Times and The Atlantic. Both also have new books out this year: Ben’s Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral came out in May, and Taylor’s Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet will release in October.

I was tipped off that Ben and Taylor are friends who also have a lot to disagree on, so this discussion should be a good one. And I have a lot to ask them: Institutions or influencers? Ads or subscriptions? What should we mourn? What should we celebrate? To what extent are platforms responsible for healthy discourse? Will TikTok end up as the only unpaywalled corner of the internet?

You can join us at 5-6pm PT next Tuesday by signing up here, or keep reading for my review of Traffic.

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Red Light, Green Light

By Jasmine Sun

For the urban commuter, traffic seems as natural a phenomenon as the ocean tides. Economies function based on the constant flow of people and products—fast, slow, stalled, blocked.

Likewise, internet traffic represents the flow of users from site to site, often measured in terms of clicks, visits, shares, and time. Early representations of Web 2.0 conjured images of swarms, crowds, and viruses—undirected masses of people creating emergent trends through their individual behaviors.

Some traffic flowed altruistically, toward protesting Egyptian dictators or contributing to Wikipedia articles. But as the internet gained steam, a new generation of companies rushed to begin capturing the new waves of traffic and converting them into advertising dollars at a far greater scale than print had ever seen.

Ben Smith’s Traffic is a story about these companies: in particular, about BuzzFeed, where Smith served as editor-in-chief of the News division for over eight years. 

BuzzFeed was helmed by founder and CEO Jonah Peretti: troll, tinkerer, Silicon Valley nerd. Like many of his peers in the burgeoning tech industry—and unlike most in the news business—Peretti’s love of the internet was rooted largely in its promise of democratization, in the triumph of the public over gatekeeping elites. 

Rather than relying on pedigreed experts to decide what topics were weighty enough to warrant front-page coverage, Peretti’s BuzzFeed—alongside peers like Gawker and Breitbart—chased clicks, a far more objective value. From laughter to anger and pride to pity, they just sought out anything that provoked a reaction. F good taste, he seemed to say—just give the people what they want. As Smith puts it, “Jonah’s approach was a radically new and abstract way of thinking about media—to focus on its psychological effect rather than on what it was actually about.”

For a while, it worked. BuzzFeed tapped into the psychology of shareability, realizing that users liked to share identity-based content to signal things about themselves to their friends. BuzzFeed also capitalized on boredom, receiving 800 million views on a livestream of two employees exploding a watermelon with rubber bands, and 4 million votes on the color of the notorious “Dress.” And unlike more traditional publishers, BuzzFeed knew that social media was the real arbiter of what mattered—not the curated front page of buzzfeed.com. Smith joined in: “I told my own reporters, a group of hungry kids excited at the opportunity to compete with their pompous elders, that I didn’t want a story that didn’t live on Twitter.”

Peretti was also ambitious. He turned down a lucrative Disney acquisition, instead betting that BuzzFeed could become to Facebook what NBC Universal was to cable TV, or even Wikipedia to Google Search. He bet that every revolutionary new medium needed its message-makers, and he was ready for the BuzzFeed content empire to power the Facebook throne. Together, they could join forces to capture the maximum amount of human attention to sell to advertisers (and perhaps foster a bit of human connection along the way). 

Source: Anthony Quintano

Peretti met frequently with Facebook product executives to discuss News Feed curation—this coziness was one of the tidbits that most surprised me in the book. In one chapter, he lays the death knell to strategic click-baiter Upworthy by showing how spammy “curiosity gap” headlines (“She Has A Horrifying Story To Tell. Except It Isn’t Actually True.”) were dominating the feed. In another, Peretti points out how Facebook’s new “meaningful social interactions” metric favored the worst of BuzzFeed’s content, prioritizing whatever links would prompt the biggest flame wars in the replies.

From a values standpoint, the partnership made sense. Peretti’s radical principles may have rattled the media industry, but they feel all too familiar as startup canon. Don’t be precious. That question is empirical. Do whatever makes the number go up. What was important was what people liked, and what people liked was what was important. Virality was content-agnostic, it could be reduced to a “science,” and BuzzFeed was the research lab developing its most viral strains.

But there was always one big problem with Peretti’s hypothesis. There is no such thing as “organic”; traffic is always being controlled. While his friendly conversations with Facebook helped BuzzFeed, they also highlighted the extent to which the social media giant had their hands on the levers of viral success. In one pivotal conversation, Adam Mosseri asks: “‘How often do you think things should go viral like the Dress?’… Jonah was surprised by the question—and by the idea that the frequency of things going viral was up to Mosseri’s team.” Only Facebook, the platform play, produced and routed traffic. BuzzFeed merely chased and received it.

After all, Facebook needed great content to show users, but only insofar as it kept them scrolling through ads. When it learned that videos retained attention for longer, they urged publishers to “pivot to video”—burning cash for inflated views. When Facebook noticed that news articles sent users off-platform, they downranked links. When Facebook got spooked by superspreaders like The Dress and fake election news, they narrowed global reach to favor family and friends. And ultimately, when Facebook simply became, well, uncool and its user growth slowed… so did new traffic to BuzzFeed. The partnership eventually looked more like dependence, and dependence ultimately spelled death.

By the late 2010s, web traffic was flowing so quickly and among so many different destinations that its value inevitably dropped. Advertisers were paying less for the same amount of views, and BuzzFeed’s sky-high video and news production costs were getting difficult to justify to investors. In a virality-constrained world, publishers had to pay more just to get their own promoted articles to find new readers on the feed. The first round of layoffs hit in 2017. More came in 2019, then each of the three years after that. Finally, in April 2023, just mere weeks before Smith’s book was released, BuzzFeed officially shuttered its award-winning News division, which Smith himself had founded and led from 2011 to 2020.

I came away with three big lessons from Smith’s book. One, traffic is not money. Two, traffic is not quality. And three, traffic is not natural. The numbers might be going up and to the right, but what matters far more is the substance behind them.

These are hard things to internalize after a decade of glittering promises about the internet powering a new era of free and democratic media. But we know now that traffic was fickle and accident-prone. The question is what stronger infrastructure we’ll now build in its place.

You can purchase a copy of Traffic here or preorder Taylor’s Extremely Online here. If you want to dive deeper and ask your own questions, RSVP for our event with Ben and Taylor on Tuesday.

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🌀 microdoses

• I was very endeared reading the “Definitive Oral History of BuzzFeed News”—sure, it might’ve been unsustainable, but it was clearly a blast to be there.

• One promising new media model is Defector Media, the worker-owned cooperative thriving through paid subscriptions.

• Read

  Sam Kriss
  on writing style, from hustle porn to the internet novel.

• Community member Nikhil Sethi writes about the creator economy and the neoliberal myth of the lone genius.

💝 closing note

Thank you very much to everyone who applied to be a Reboot editor :) Very excited to share more news on this front soon!

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Jasmine & Reboot team