Ryan Holiday

The problem is that facts are rarely clearly good or bad. They just are. The truth is often boring and complicated. Navigating this quandary forces marketers and publishers to conspire to distort this information into something that will register on the emotional spectrum of the audience. [...] Behind the scenes I work to crank up the valence of articles, relying on scandal, conflict, triviality, titillation, and dogmatism. Whatever will ensure transmission.

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.

A disgruntled ex-employee can make themselves seem very sympathetic, and reporters rarely ask why this person might be suddenly so eager to talk to them. This is something companies need to be very careful about.

“Outrage porn” is a better term. People like getting pissed off almost as much as they like actual porn.

A SCAM I CALL “trading up the chain.” It’s a strategy I developed that manipulates the media through recursion. I can turn nothing into something by placing a story with a small blog that has very low standards, which then becomes the source for a story by a larger blog, and that, in turn, for a story by larger media outlets. I create, to use the words of one media scholar, a “self-reinforcing news wave.” People like me do this every day.

Blogs need traffic, being first drives traffic, and so entire stories are created out of whole cloth to make that happen. This is just one facet of the economics of blogging, but it’s a critical one. When we understand the logic that drives these business choices, those choices become predictable. And what is predictable can be anticipated, redirected, accelerated, or controlled—however you or I choose.

Blogs need things to cover. The Times has to fill a newspaper only once per day. A cable news channel has to fill twenty-four hours of programming 365 days a year. But blogs have to fill an infinite amount of space. The site that covers the most stuff wins. Political blogs know that their traffic goes up during election cycles. Since traffic is what they sell to advertisers, elections equal increased revenue. Unfortunately, election cycles come only every few years. Worse still, they end. Blogs have a simple solution: Change reality through the coverage.

We’re a country governed by public opinion, and public opinion is largely governed by the press, so isn’t it critical to understand what governs the press?[...]To understand what makes blogs act—why the media ended up giving Trump something like $ 4.6 billion worth of free publicity—is the key to making them do what you want (or stopping this broken system). Learn their rules, change the game. That’s all it takes to control public opinion.

L’égo est une croyance malsaine en notre propre importance.

Aujourd'hui, la télévision n'est plus le premier support culturel. Internet l'a remplacée. Les blogs l'ont remplacée. You Tube, également. Ainsi que Twitter. Ce sont eux qui contrôlent notre culture exactement comme a pu le faire la télévision en son temps. Mais Internet obéit à un autre dieu : le trafic. Le Web vit et meurt au rythme des clics, car ce sont eux qui déterminent l'influence d'un blog et le chiffre d'affaires généré par la publicité. La question cruciale posée par Internet n'est pas de savoir si un contenu est divertissant ou pas, mais de savoir s'il attirera votre attention, s'il se propagera.