Ryan Holiday

Set up your own think tank. Call it the Millennial Entrepreneurs Foundation and put out “research” that really just makes companies think they need to hire you as a consultant. Don’t think climate change is real? Have a business interest in making people think it isn’t? Fund “studies” that confirm what you want and then blast the internet with them. Want to invent some ridiculous new trend? Hire experts to say it’s correlated with higher sex drive or that it’s all the rage with celebrities. Sadly, no one is going to question you.

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.

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.

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.

But while in the past decisions were guided by an editor’s intuitive sense of what would pander to their audience, today it is a science. Sites employ full-time data analysts to ensure that the absolute worst is brought out in the audience.

You can’t take your click back. They’ve already sold it on a real-time advertising exchange. They’ve already been paid for it. (And remember, if you share the article in exasperation or even sheer disgust to a friend to show them how bad it is, you’re actually helping the outlet!)

When I advised a client to shoot the book he’d just written off into space, it wasn’t for scientific exploration—it was because doing something like that is so unusual, the media couldn’t resist writing about it. The same went for another author I worked with who held an atheist church service in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We tried to name the Planned Parenthood clinic after Tucker Max because we weren’t content to sit around and hope that people saw the book as controversial—we wanted to do something controversial. And all these stunts got considerable attention because the coverage was good for the outlets. They raked in all sorts of readers from it.

Whereas subscriptions are about trust, single-use traffic is all immediacy and impulse—even if the news has to be distorted to trigger it. Our news is what rises, and what rises is what spreads, and what spreads is what makes us angry or makes us laugh. Our media diet is quickly transformed into junk food, fake stories engineered by people like me to be consumed and passed around. It is the refined and processed sugars of the information food pyramid—out of the ordinary, unnatural, and deliberately sweetened.

As a marketer, getting something “controversial” to blow up is easy, and it’s the tactic a media manipulator prefers to use over doing something “important.” With limited resources and the constraints of a tight medium, there are only a handful of options: sensationalism, extremism, sex, scandal, hatred. The media manipulator knows that bloggers know that these things sell—so that’s what we sell them.

In 1835, shortly after Day began, James Gordon Bennett, Sr., launched the New York Herald. Within just a few years the Herald would be the largest-circulation daily in the United States, perhaps in the world. It would also be the most sensational and vicious. It was all these things not because of Bennett’s personal beliefs but because of his business beliefs. He knew that the newspaper’s role was “not to instruct but to startle.” His paper was anti-black, anti-immigrant, and anti-subtlety. These causes sold papers—to both people who loved them for it and people who hated them for it. And they bought and they bought.

He is smart enough to know that if he says something offensive, liberals won’t be able to resist responding—he knows that this response will generate attention and raise his profile. But if this is so obvious and clear, isn’t the media at least partly responsible if they give blatant trolling attempts a wider audience? Aren’t they complicit?

For blogs, practical utility is often a liability. It is a traffic killer. So are other potentially positive attributes. It’s hard to get trolls angry enough to comment while being fair or reasonable. Waiting for the whole story to unfold can be a surefire way to eliminate the possibility for follow-up posts. So can pointing out that an issue is frivolous. Being the voice of reason does also. No blogger wants to write about another blogger who made him or her look bad.

If I am creating the story as a fake tipster, I ask a lot of rhetorical questions: Could [some preposterous misreading of the situation] be what’s going on? Do you think that [juicy scandal] is what they’re hiding? And then I watch as the writers pose those very same questions to their readers in a click-friendly headline. The answer to my questions is obviously “No, of course not,” but I play the skeptic about my own clients—even going so far as to say nasty things—so the bloggers will do it on the front page of their site.

Some analysis shows a good question brings twice the response of an emphatic exclamation point.

The web has only one currency, and you can use any word you want for it—valence, extremes, arousal, powerfulness, excitement—but it adds up to false perception. Which is great if you’re a publisher but not if you’re someone who cares about the people in Detroit or you’re someone who wants to find common ground with their neighbors. What thrives online is not the writing that reflects anything close to the reality in which you and I live. Nor does it allow for the kind of change that will create the world we wish to live in.

It’s almost as if the insatiable media appetite for stories that will make people angry and outraged has created a market for anger and outrage. It’s almost as if that’s why we’re so divided and upset. Oh wait, that is why!

I had substantial data to back up the fact that chatter correlated with a spike in purchases of whatever product was the subject of the conversation. Armed with this information, I made it my strategy to manufacture chatter by exploiting emotions of high valence: arousal and indignation. I’d serve ads in direct violation of the standards of publishers and ad networks, knowing that while they’d inevitably be pulled, the ads would generate all sorts of brand awareness in the few minutes users saw them.

I want to take things that people are passionate about and connect them to my products or clients—to get people worked up about them, to get them talking. No smart marketer is ever going to push a story with the stink of reasonableness, complexity, or mixed emotions. We want to rile people up. We want to provoke you into talking.

A powerful predictor of whether content will spread online is [...] the degree of positive or negative emotion a person is made to feel. Both extremes are more desirable than anything in the middle. Regardless of the topic, the more an article makes someone feel good or bad, the more likely it is to make the Most E-mailed list.

So a lot of times people end up having to take a lot of untrue crap because they don’t have much recourse with a media that cares more about what spreads than what is accurate.