REVIEW: ‘Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral’ by Ben Smith
Get ready to take a trip down memory lane with Ben Smith’s new book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. Smith, the former editor of BuzzFeed News, takes readers on a journey through the early days of the social media boom, chronicling the rise and fall of two Manhattan-based bloggers, Jonah Peretti and Nick Denton.
The Birth of Online Procrastination
Smith starts the book with a hilarious anecdote about Peretti, who was procrastinating at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass. just weeks before George W. Bush was sworn in as president. Peretti went on nike.com and started playing around with the new customizable shoe feature. He typed the word “fuck” in the text box. When that didn’t work, he tried “sweatshop.” The prank went viral, and a few weeks later, Peretti was wearing an ill-fitting jacket on the set of the Today show and yucking it up with Katie Couric.
The Rise of BuzzFeed
Peretti went on to co-found the Huffington Post and then BuzzFeed, which briefly conquered the internet in a blitzkrieg of meme-themed listicles. Peretti devoted his career to studying and chasing “traffic,” a crucial data point for upstart media companies pitching venture capitalists and corporate advertisers. Smith’s book is a deeply reported history of the whiz-bang rise and whimpering fall of Peretti and Denton.
Delusion and Dollars
Delusion and dollars feature prominently throughout the story. There’s even some rivalry between Denton and Peretti, two nerds who agreed about almost everything except whether the world could be changed or was even worth changing. They both excelled in giving people what they really want. Whereas Gawker chased traffic by proudly publishing illicit content on its front page, Peretti turned Arianna Huffington’s vanity project into a traffic juggernaut by, among other things, quietly cramming the site with celebrity “side boob” pics that didn’t show up on the front page next to John Cusack’s tedious blog posts about the future of the Democratic Party.
Peretti’s internet innovations helped shape our digital age, and it’s horribly depressing.
He was among the first to figure out how to optimize a website’s content for search-engine algorithms to boost traffic from bored office workers googling “Jennifer Aniston nude” or “What time is the Super Bowl?”
Peretti proved himself to be the superior nerd when it came to exploiting human nature (and Big Tech algorithms) to capture that sweet, sweet traffic to the tune of 130 million unique visitors every month.
The Legacy of BuzzFeed
In retrospect, Smith concludes, it’s hard to argue that BuzzFeed’s meteoric rise was anything other than a blip compared with the larger forces at work. Facebook and Google were taking over the world, and Peretti was simply the most adept at riding their coattails. BuzzFeed News, which Smith departed in 2020, no longer exists.
Smith’s book is an enjoyable, nostalgic read for those of us who were alive and online between 2005 and the moment former president Donald Trump descended his golden escalator. It takes place in a distant reality, full of characters and viral moments that felt so consequential at the time, but which you’ve probably forgotten thanks to the internet’s corrosive effects on our attention spans and ability to remember things.
Overall, Traffic is a fascinating look at the early days of the social media boom and the people who helped shape our digital age.
Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith Penguin, 352 pp., $30
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