Viral death: how new media failed to live up to its promise

In his new book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, Ben Smith, former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, relates the rags-to-riches-to-rags story of the first wave of media “pure-plays”, the digital-only US news companies that surfed into public consciousness courtesy of Facebook, Twitter and Google and crested on a wave of venture capital cash predicated on the assumption that the hundreds of millions of page views they generated would inevitably translate into large profit. To use a popular clickbait phrase of the period: you won’t believe what happened next.

In the heady days of the early 2010s, it seemed nothing could stop Buzzfeed, Huffpo, Gawker, Vice, Jezebel, Business Insider and a host of other start-ups in New York’s newly coined Silicon Alley. Entrepreneurs such as Jonah Peretti and Nick Denton apparently understood how digital connectivity and social sharing had transformed media. Unencumbered by the shackles of print or broadcast, they held the keys to the mystical formula for internet virality. Media analysts debated whether it was a question of if or when Buzzfeed surpassed or simply swallowed up the New York Times.

The New York Times remains in rude good health but Buzzfeed News closed last month. Vice Media, which laid off most of its staff earlier this year, is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Most of the other bright young things are now either extinct or on life support.

The (still disputed) role of Facebook in the 2016 election of Donald Trump marked a sharp political turn and the beginning of the end for Buzzfeed and its ilk

What happened? For the most part, it’s a familiar tale of hubris and greed. Executives and investors believed their own hype and expanded too fast. Then, when revenue projections fell short, they cut costs and turned themselves into clickbait farms. The inevitable death spiral followed.

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.More dramatically, Gawker was hoist by its own muckraking petard in 2016 when it was bankrupted in a privacy suit over a sex tape involving wrestler Hulk Hogan. The suit was bankrolled by right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel in revenge for the site’s outing him as gay, (yes, there is a lot going on in those sentences). Jezebel briefly flared as a bracingly snarky oppositional voice in the highly constrained world of women’s publishing, then fell back to earth.

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Most of these sites had their origins in the blogging culture of the early noughties. As bloggers built audiences and started to go mainstream, they found themselves intertwined with the fortunes of the new, rapidly growing social media platforms. Bloggers were already accustomed to having an intimate, conversational relationship with their readers. Twitter turbocharged that relationship and Facebook rewarded it with millions of eyeballs, comments and shares. Viral hits such as 2015′s #thedress reached global audiences of a previously unimaginable scale.

Reflecting on all this in the New York Times this week, Smith recalled the insurgent spirit of the era. “The new generation of millennial writers at the Gawker sites, BuzzFeed, Vice and other digital projects challenged stuffy, insular and occasionally deceitful institutions that deserved challenging, but it also lacked, in retrospect, a sense of the value of having trusted institutions at all.”

It’s foolish to try to build a business empire on top of somebody else’s platform. As other media companies have since discovered, Facebook was never their friend

It’s no coincidence that the golden years of Silicon Alley coincided with the Obama presidency. As Smith tells it, this was a time when data-driven tech, online news start-ups and social media itself were all seen as part of a new progressive, millennial zeitgeist. Under the surface, in retrospect, there were other figures – Andrew Breitbart, Steve Bannon – with a very different agenda. The (still disputed) role of Facebook in the 2016 election of Donald Trump marked a sharp political turn and the beginning of the end for Buzzfeed and its ilk.

Their cautionary tale has offered some salutary lessons. One, which all those Harvard MBAs should really have known from the start, is that it’s foolish to try to build a business empire on top of somebody else’s platform. As other media companies have since discovered, Facebook was never their friend. When Mark Zuckerberg’s strategy shifted away from linking to news, many of the outlets that depended on Facebook were left high and dry.

An even more vital lesson for digital publishers, as the title of Smith’s book suggests, is that the obsession with internet traffic figures that drove these companies proved mistaken. Millions of page views might look good on an annual report, but they’re a cheap sugar rush based on an advertising model that has proved to be at best illusory, at worst downright fraudulent. That’s why the model now being pursued by most media companies, including in Ireland, prioritises subscriptions over traffic. And it’s why Smith himself, whose news media start-up Semafor was launched last autumn, emphasises the importance of the home page, something his peers would have laughed at 10 years ago. In the post-Facebook, post-Twitter era, the viral hit is over. Long live the loyal reader.