Study the top stories at Digg or MSN.com and you’ll notice a pattern: the top stories all polarize people. If you make it threaten people’s 3 Bs—behavior, belief, or belongings—you get a huge virus-like dispersion.
—TIM FERRISS, #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR
You and we know that it is generally just the best and most valuable things that do not find their echo immediately.
—KURT WOLFF, PUBLISHER OF FRANZ KAFKA
THE ADVICE THAT MIT MEDIA STUDIES PROFESSOR Henry Jenkins gives publishers and companies is blunt: “If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.” With social sharing comes traffic, and with traffic comes money. Content that isn’t shared isn’t worth anything.
For someone tasked with advancing narratives in the media, the flip side of this advice is equally straightforward: If it spreads, you’re golden. Blogs don’t have the resources to advertise their posts, and bloggers certainly don’t have the time to work out a publicity launch for something they’ve written. Every blog, publisher, and oversharer in your Facebook feed is constantly looking to post things that will take on a life of their own and get attention, links, and new readers with the least work possible. Whether that content is accurate, important, or helpful doesn’t even register on their list of priorities.
If the quality of their content doesn’t matter to bloggers, do you think it’s going to matter to marketers? It’s never mattered to me. So I design what I sell to bloggers based on what I know (and they think) will spread. I give them what they think will go viral online—and make them money.
If you’re like me, you’ve sat and stared in fascination at the pictures of the ruins of Detroit that get passed around the internet. We’ve all gaped at the stunning shots of the cavelike interior of the decaying United Artists Theater and the towering Michigan Central Station that resembles an abandoned Gothic cathedral. These beautiful high-res photo slideshows are impressive pieces of online photojournalism . . . or so you think.
Like everyone else, I ate up these slideshows, and I even harbored a guilty desire to go to Detroit and walk through the ruins. My friends know this and send me the newest ones as soon as they come out. When I see the photos I can’t help thinking of this line from Fight Club:
In the world I see, you’re stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. . . . You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.
To see a broken, abandoned American city is a moving, nearly spiritual experience, one you are immediately provoked to share with everyone you know.
A slideshow that generates a reaction like that is online gold. An ordinary blog post is only one page long, so a thousand-word article about Detroit would get one pageview per viewer. A slideshow about Detroit gets twenty per user, hundreds of thousands of times over, while premium advertising rates are charged against the photos. A recent twenty-picture display posted by the Huffington Post was commented on more than four thousand times and liked twenty-five thousand times on Facebook. And that was the second time they’d posted it. The New York Times’s website has two of their own, for a total of twenty-three photos. The Guardian’s website has a sixteen-pager. Time.com’s eleven-pager is the top Google result for “Detroit photos.” We’re talking about millions of views combined.
One would think that any photo of Detroit would be an instant hit online. Not so. A series of beautiful but sad photographs of fore-closed and crumbling Detroit houses and their haggard residents was posted on Magnum Photos’s site in 2009, well before most of the others. It shows the same architectural devastation, the same poverty and decline. While the slideshow on the Huffington Post received four thousand comments within days, these photos got twenty-one comments over two years.1
In an article in the New Republic called “The Case Against Economic Disaster Porn,” Noreen Malone points out that one thing stands out about the incredibly viral photographs of Detroit: Not a single one of the popular photos of the ruins of Detroit has a person in it. That was the difference between the Huffington Post slideshows and the Magnum photos—Magnum dared to include human beings in their photos of Detroit. The photos that spread, on the other hand, are deliberately devoid of any sign of life.2
Detroit has a homeless population of nearly twenty thousand, and in 2011 city funding for homeless shelters was cut in half. Thousands more live in foreclosed houses and buildings without electricity or heat, the very same structures in the pictures. These photos don’t just omit people. Detroit is a city overrun by stray dogs, which roam the city in packs hunting and scavenging for food. Conservative figures estimate that there are as many as 50,000 wild dogs living in Detroit and something like 650,000 feral cats. In other words, you can’t walk a block in Detroit without seeing heartbreaking and deeply wounded signs of life.
You’d have to try not to. And that’s exactly what these slideshow photographers do. Why? Because all that is depressing. As Jonah Peretti, the virality expert behind both the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, believes, “if something is a total bummer, people don’t share it.” And since people wouldn’t share it, blogs won’t publish it. Seeing the homeless and drug addicts and starving, dying animals would take away all the fun.* It’d make the viewers feel uncomfortable, and unsettling images are not conducive to sharing. Why, Peretti asks, would anyone—bloggers or readers—want to pass along bad feelings?3
The economics of the web make it impossible to portray the complex situation in Detroit accurately. It turns out that photos of Detroit that spread do so precisely because they are dead. Simple narratives like the haunting ruins of a city spread and live, while complicated ones like a city filled with real people who desperately need help don’t.
One city. Two possible portrayals. One is a bummer; one looks cool. Only one makes it into the Huffington Post slideshow.
My point here is not sociological so much as it is practical. Let me explain how this ends up affecting companies and public figures. Say someone accuses you of something horrible—obviously those salacious allegations make for good copy. The problem is that the truth—your response—is often much less interesting than the accusations. Getting caught stepping out on a spouse might generate headlines. The fact that the marriage was long over, that you were both just waiting for the paperwork to be finished and, in fact, the spouse has moved on too—that’s starting to involve a lot of variables. It’s complicated. It’s boring. No one is getting excited to share that.
This is something I have to explain to clients in crisis PR situations all the time. I say, “Look, if your response isn’t more interesting than the allegations, no one is going to care. You might as well not bother.” 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. Or, worse, you get an escalation: Someone accuses someone of something. The person has to respond that it’s all made up and the person is only doing it because “[insert a different lie],” and it just goes round and round and round.
Look at a slideshow of Detroit and you might think the world is ending. Look at some headlines on Upworthy.com and you might be forgiven for thinking that the world is doing awesome. Because just as extreme negativity is one effective technique, so is cloying and saccharine positivity. Check out these headlines that did millions of views:
“Watch a Preacher Attack Gay Marriage and Totally Change His Mind on the Spot”
“A Message to Everyone Out There Who Thinks They Aren’t Beautiful in Pictures”
“She Tried to Kill Herself and It Didn’t Work. See How She Made All That into Something
Beautiful”
“She Didn’t Think the Love of Her Life Was Romantic Enough. Then She Looked out Her Office Window”
“Move Over, Barbie—You’re Obsolete”
If only the world were actually this way. . . .
Indeed, the site’s editors know that it is not. But folks at Upworthy are filtering and exclusively delivering only a small sliver of reality—one that is all sweet and no sweat. Even Upworthy’s pop-up message designed to snag e-mails is illustrative of their approach: “It’s nice to be reminded of the good in the world. And it should happen more often.” Then you give them your e-mail address and they begin to bombard you with “reminders.”
On the opposite end of the spectrum, much of the media is obsessed with what might be called “outrage porn.” Here are a few headlines from Salon.com to prove my point.
“Patton Oswalt Makes Asian Name Joke, in Response to Racist KTVU News Report”
“Another Portuguese Water Dog? The Obamas Should Have Made a Different Statement”
“The Onion Thinks Incest, Statutory Rape Is Hilarious”
“Gawker’s ‘Privilege Tournament’ Is All About White Anger”
“ ‘The Conjuring’: Right-wing, Woman-Hating and Really Scary”
Is the world terrible or is it awesome? Can’t these people just make up their minds? The press, Martin Amis once noted, “is more vicious than the populace.” It’s also more positive and gushy—as Upworthy is—than normal people. Why? Because it’s paid to be.
In 2010, Jonah Berger, an expert on virality at the Wharton School, looked at seven thousand articles that made it onto the New York Times Most E-mailed list. (A story from the Times is shared on Twitter once every four seconds, making the list one of the biggest media platforms on the web.) The researchers’ results confirm almost everything we see when content like the sensational ruin porn of Detroit goes viral.4 For me it confirmed every intuition behind my manipulations.
According to the study, “the most powerful predictor of virality is how much anger an article evokes” [emphasis mine]. I will say it again: The most powerful predictor of what spreads online is anger. Is it any surprise that there is so much anger-provoking content online, then? No wonder the outrage I created for Tucker’s movie worked so well. According to Berger’s study, anger has such a profound effect that one standard deviation increase in the anger rating of an article is the equivalent of spending an additional three hours as the lead story on the front page of NYTimes.com.
Again, extremes in any direction have a large impact on how something will spread, but certain emotions do better than others. For instance, an equal shift in the positivity of an article is the equivalent of spending about 1.2 hours as the lead story. It’s a significant but clear difference. The angrier an article makes the reader, the better. But happy works too.
The researchers found that while sadness is an extreme emotion, it is a wholly unviral one. Sadness, like what one might feel to see a stray dog shivering for warmth or a homeless man begging for money, is typically a low-arousal emotion. Sadness depresses our impulse for social sharing. It’s why nobody wanted to share the Magnum photos but everybody gladly shared the ones on the Huffington Post. The HuffPo photos were awe-some; they made us angry, or they surprised us. Such emotions trigger a desire to act—they are arousing—and that is exactly the reaction a publisher hopes to exploit. “People get viral content wrong,” Eli Pariser, the founder of Upworthy, told Businessweek. “They imagine that the reason people share stuff is to have a laugh. But a huge part of sharing is being passionate about something, about shedding light on what really matters.”
In turn, it’s what marketers exploit as well. A powerful predictor of whether content will spread online is valence, or 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. 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.
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. To turn it into something that spreads and to drive clicks. Behind the scenes I work to crank up the valence of articles, relying on scandal, conflict, triviality, titillation, and dogmatism. Whatever will ensure transmission.
The press is often in the evil position of needing to go negative and play tricks with your psyche in order to drive you to share their material online. For instance, in studies where subjects are shown negative video footage (war, an airplane crash, an execution, a natural disaster), they become more aroused, can better recall what happened, pay more attention, and engage more cognitive resources to consume the media than nonnegative footage.5 That’s the kind of stuff that will make you hit “share this.” They push your buttons so you’ll press theirs.
Things must be negative but not too negative. Hopelessness, despair—these drive us to do nothing. Pity, empathy—those drive us to do something, like get up from our computers to act. But anger, fear, excitement, laughter, and outrage—these drive us to spread. They drive us to do something that makes us feel as if we are doing something, when in reality we are only contributing to what is probably a superficial and utterly meaningless conversation. Online games and apps operate on the same principles and exploit the same impulses: Be consuming without frustrating, manipulative without revealing the strings.
For those who know what levers provoke people to share, media manipulation becomes simply a matter of packaging and presentation. All it takes is the right frame, the right angle, and millions of readers will willingly send your idea or image or ad to their friends, family, and coworkers on your behalf. Bloggers know this, and want it badly. If I can hand them a story that may be able to deliver, who are they to refuse?
When I designed online ads for American Apparel, I almost always looked for an angle that would provoke. Outrage, self-righteousness, and titillation all worked equally well. Naturally, the sexy ones are probably those you remember most, but the formula worked for all types of images. Photos of kids dressed up like adults, dogs wearing clothes, ad copy that didn’t make any sense—all high-valence, viral images. If I could generate a reaction, I could propel the ad from being something I had to pay for people to see (by buying ad inventory) to something people would gladly post on the front page of their highly trafficked websites.
I once ran a series of completely nude (not safe for work, or NSFW) advertisements featuring the porn star Sasha Grey on two blogs. They were very small websites, and the total cost of the ads was only twelve hundred dollars. A naked woman with visible pubic hair + a major U.S. retailer + blogs = a massive online story.
The ads were picked up online by Nerve, BuzzFeed, Fast Company, Jezebel, Refinery29, NBC New York, Fleshbot, the Portland Mercury, and many others. They eventually made it into print as far away as Rolling Stone Brazil, and they’re still being passed around online. The idea wasn’t ever to sell product directly through the ads themselves, since the model wasn’t really wearing any of it—and the sites were too small, anyway. I knew that just the notion of a company running pornographic advertisements on legitimate blogs would be too arousing (no pun intended) for share-hungry sites and readers to resist. I’m not sure if I was the first person to ever do this, but I certainly told reporters I was. Some blogs wrote about it in anger, some wrote about it in disgust, and others loved it and wanted more. The important part was that they wrote about it at all. It ended up being seen millions of times, and almost none of those views were on the original sites where we paid for the ads to run.
I wasn’t trying to create controversy for the sake of controversy. The publicity from the spectacle generated tens of thousands of dollars in sales, and that was my intention all along. 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. A slight slap on the wrist or pissing off some prudes was a penalty well worth paying for, for all the attention and money we got.
In the case of American Apparel, this leveraged advertising strategy I developed was responsible for taking online sales from $40 million to nearly $60 million in three years—with a minuscule ad budget.
I use these tactics to sell products, and they work—lots of product gets sold. But I have come to know that the act of constantly provoking and fooling people has a larger cost. Nor am I the only one doing it.
You probably don’t remember what happened on February 19, 2009, and that’s because nothing notable happened—at least by any normal standard. But to those who make their living by “what spreads,” it was an incredibly lucrative day, and for our country, it was a costly one.
During what was supposed to be a standard on-camera segment, CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli had a somewhat awkward melt-down on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He went off script and started ranting about the Obama administration and the then recently passed stimulus bill. Then he started yelling about homeowners who bit off bigger mortgages than they could chew, and Cuba, and a bunch of other ridiculous stuff. Traders on the floor began to cheer (and jeer), and he ended by declaring that he was thinking about having a “Chicago Tea Party” to dump derivatives into Lake Michigan. The whole thing looked like a shit show.
CNBC was smart. They recognized from the reaction of their anchors—which ranged from horror to mild bemusement—that they had something valuable on their hands. Instead of waiting for the video to be discovered by bloggers, news junkies, message boards, and mash-up artists, CNBC posted it on their own website immediately. While this might seem like a strange move for a serious media outlet to make, it wasn’t. The Drudge Report linked to the clip, and it immediately blew up. This was, as Rob Walker wrote for the Atlantic in an analysis of the event, a core principle of our new viral culture: “Humiliation should not be suppressed. It should be monetized.” Instead of being ashamed of its crappy television journalism, CNBC was able to make extra money from the millions of views it generated.
The real reason the Santelli clip spread so quickly was a special part of toying with the valence of the web. Originally the clip spread as a joke, with the degree of amusement being determined by where the viewers fit on the political spectrum. But where some saw a joke, others saw a truth teller. An actual Chicago Tea Party was organized. Disaffected voters genuinely agreed with what he had said. Santelli wasn’t having a meltdown, some thought; he was just as angry as they were. On the other end of the spectrum, not only were people not laughing, they were horribly offended. To them this was proof of CNBC’s political bias. Some were so serious that they endorsed a conspiracy theory (launched by a blog on Playboy.com, of all places) that alleged the meltdown was a deliberately planned hoax funded by conservative billionaires to energize the right wing.
Regardless of how they interpreted Santelli’s rant, everyone’s re-actions were so extreme that few of them were able to see it for what it truly was: a mildly awkward news segment that should have been forgotten.
Of all the political and financial narratives we needed in 2009, this was surely not it. Reasoned critiques of leveraged capitalism, solutions that required sacrifice—these were things that did not yield exciting blog posts or spread well online. But the Santelli clip did. CNBC fell ass first into the perfect storm of what spreads on the web—humiliation, conspiracy theories, anger, frustration, humor, passion, and possibly the interplay of several or all of these things together. And then, as if this weren’t enough, the whole absurd charade happened again in 2015 and 2016 with the rise of the pro-Trump faction of the Republican Party. 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!
As Chris Hedges, the philosopher and journalist, wrote, “In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion.”
As a manipulator, I certainly encourage and fuel this age. So do the content creators. The media don’t really care how they come off as long as they can sell ads against the traffic they generate. And the audience says they’re okay with it too—voting clearly with their clicks. We’re all feeding that monster.
This may seem like nothing. It’s just people having fun, right? Sure, my deliberately provocative ads, once caught, quickly do disappear and awareness subsides—just like all viral web content. Roughly 96 percent of the seven thousand articles that made the Most E-mailed list in the New York Times study did so only once. In almost no cases did an article make the list, drop off, and then return. They had a brief, transitory existence and then disappeared. But though viral content may disappear, its consequences do not—be it a toxic political party or an addiction to cheap and easy attention.
The omission of humanity from the popular slideshows of Detroit is not a malicious choice. Nor is the injection of pseudo-positivity into viral stories on other sites. There was no person like me behind the scenes hoping to mislead you. There was no censorship or overt manipulation (in most cases). In fact, there are thousands of the other, more realistic photos out there. Yet, all the same, the public is misinformed about a situation that we desperately need to solve. Through the selective mechanism of what spreads—and gets traffic and pageviews—we get suppression not by omission but by transmission.
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 does, however, make it possible for me to do what I do. And people like me will keep doing it as long as that is true.
*Another photo for a much more popular New York Times slideshow says it all. The picture is of the abandoned Michigan Central Station, and in the snow on the floor are dozens of crisscrossing footprints and a door. There are no people. “Don’t worry,” it seems to say. “There’s no reason to feel bad. Everybody left already. Keep gawking.”