1. “Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?”
2. “How Little Sleep Can You Get Away With?”
3. “Is Sugar Toxic?”
4. “What’s the Single Best Exercise?”
5. “Do Cellphones Cause Brain Cancer?”
—SCREENSHOT OF THE MOST POPULAR ARTICLES BOX, NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, APRIL 16, 2011
I am not surprised when anonymous scribblers write and publish falsehoods, or make criticism on matters which they know nothing about or which they are incapable of comprehending. It is their trade. They live by it.
—GENERAL WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN
ARE LOADED-QUESTION HEADLINES POPULAR? YOU bet. As Brian Moylan, a former Gawker writer, once bragged, the key is to “get the whole story into the headline but leave out just enough that people will want to click.”
Nick Denton knows that being evasive and misleading is one of the best ways to get traffic and increase the bottom line. In a memo to his bloggers he gave specific instructions on how to best manipulate the reader for profit:
When examining a claim, even a dubious claim, don’t dismiss with a skeptical headline before getting to your main argument. Because nobody will get to your main argument. You might as well not bother. . . . You set up a mystery—and explain it after the link. Some analysis shows a good question brings twice the response of an emphatic exclamation point.
I have my own analysis: When you take away the question mark, it usually turns their headline into a lie. The reason bloggers like to use it is because it lets them get away with a false statement that no one can criticize. After the reader clicks, they soon discover that the answer to the “question” in their headline is obviously “No, of course not.” But since it was posed as a question, the blogger wasn’t wrong—they were only asking. “Did Glenn Beck Rape and Murder a Young Girl in 1990?” Sure, I don’t know, whatever gets clicks.
Bloggers tell themselves that they are just tricking the reader with the headline to get them to read their nuanced, fair-er articles. But that’s a lie. (I actually read the articles, and they’re rarely any better than the headline would suggest.) This lie is just one bloggers tell to feel better about themselves, and you can exploit it. So give them a headline; it’s what they want. Let them rationalize it privately however they need to.
When I want someone to write about my clients, I might intentionally exploit their ambivalence about deceiving people. If I am giving them an official comment on behalf of a client, I leave room for them to speculate by not fully addressing the issue. 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.
Manipulators trick the bloggers, and they trick their readers. We both want the clicks and so we get them together. This arrangement is great for the traffic-hungry bloggers, for people like me, and my attention-seeking clients. Readers might be better served by posts that inform them about things that really matter. But, as you saw in the last chapter, stories with useful information are less likely to be shared virally than other types of content.
For example: Movie reviews, in-depth tutorials, technical analysis, and recipes are typically popular with the initial audience and occasionally appear on Most E-mailed lists. But they tend not to draw significant amounts of traffic from other websites. They are less fun to share and spread less as a result. This may seem counterintuitive at first, but it makes perfect sense according to the economics of online content. Commentary on top of someone else’s commentary or advice is cumbersome and often not very interesting to read. Worse, the writer of the original material may have been so thorough as to have solved the problem or proffered a reasonable solution—two very big dampers on getting a heated debate going.
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.
To use an exclamation point, to refer back to Denton’s remark, is to be final. Being final, or authoritative, or helpful, or any of these obviously positive attributes is avoided, because they don’t bait user engagement. And engaged users are where the money is.
Before objecting that “user engagement” is a good thing, let’s look at it in practice. Pretend for a second that you read an article on some blog about an issue that makes you angry. Angry enough that you must let the author know how you feel about it: You go to leave a comment.
You must be logged in to comment, the site tells you. Not yet a member? Register now. Click, a new page comes up with ads all across it. Fill out the form on the page, handing over an e-mail address, gender, and city, and hit “submit.” Damn, got the captcha wrong, so the page reloads with another ad. Finally get it right and get the confirmation page (another page, another ad). Check e-mail: Click this link to validate your account. Registration is now complete, it says: another page and another ad. Log in. More pages, more ads, but you have finally “engaged.”
This is how it is everywhere. It might take as many as ten pageviews to leave a comment on a blog the first time. Or when you see a mistake in an article and fill out the Send Corrections form? Well, first they’ll need your e-mail address, and then they ask if you want to receive daily e-mails from them.*
When you do this, you are the sucker. The site doesn’t care about your opinion; they care that, by eliciting it, they score free pageviews. Of course, this kind of manipulation is not new—it is endemic to all kinds of media.
Jonah Peretti of BuzzFeed once pointed out how reality TV sucks in viewers.
The reason that reality TV work[ed] well for a time is that the classic reality TV formula, in the beginning, was the tribal council and somebody getting eliminated. So you could have 50 percent of the show being boring filler and you’re kind of wanting to change the channel but you’re like, “Oh, but I wonder if my favorite person’s going to get eliminated.” So you have to watch to the end to see the elimination. In a way, that was a way of gaining time.
And now online publishers have found their own ways to manipulate audiences—whether it’s with the nineteen-page slideshow or exploiting the so-called headline gap or auto-playing a video.
As Andrew Ledvina, a former Facebook data scientist, bluntly put it, “The fundamental purpose of most people at Facebook working on data is to influence and alter people’s moods and behaviour. They are doing it all the time to make you like stories more, to click on more ads, to spend more time on the site.”
Blogs don’t care about the issues they are provoking outrage about, and social networks don’t care what people are being social about—they care about what it means for them, how much traffic and time on site it generates. I remember reading a video games blog post of all the reasons why someone should buy the new PlayStation console over the new Xbox. It got like 500,000 views. Then the same blogger turned around and wrote about all the reasons to buy the Xbox over the PlayStation. It also got 500,000 views. There were plenty of comments and shares on both.
Nobody involved actually cares what any of these people think or are feeling—not even a little bit. They just care about the reaction and the attention.
Mike Cernovich, the alt-right blogger, is often called a troll by people in the media. He has come to embrace the label. 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?
I believe they are. I’ll give you an example: In 2012 my client Tucker Max was looking to make a large charitable donation but wanted to get publicity for it. He had a joke in one of his books that he had paid for so many abortions over the years, Planned Parenthood should name a clinic after him. My idea was to make that a reality—to buy the naming rights for a clinic. As it turned out, Planned Parenthood had not only been viciously stripped of its Texas funding by Republican governor Rick Perry but also were looking to open a new clinic in North Texas. It seemed like a win-win-win: Tucker gets press for something positive (for a change), Planned Parenthood reaches a new audience, and women get access to potentially lifesaving services.
But this was also clearly trolling—it was going to piss a lot of people off and promote his new book. When Planned Parenthood declined to accept the donation (after a few weeks of serious negotiations), I wrote an article about it for Forbes.com titled “Why Did Planned Parenthood Turn Down $500,000?” I then sent this link to dozens of sites I had researched based on their probability of writing about the story. Many of them picked it up, including the Huffington Post, Jezebel, Salon, the Daily Beast, KVUE-TV Austin, KFDM-TV Beaumont, KGO-AM San Francisco, the New York Daily News, Gothamist, and the Houston Chronicle. I had one of my employees compile all the links from the stunt. The first wave of attention alone was eight pages, single spaced. Eight pages of links. After we submitted some of these links to Reddit, the story traded up the chain and got even more important outlets involved.
Again, I fully admit this was trolling, but I assert that the media participated in it. They certainly benefited from it. The Huffington Post story alone got over ten thousand Facebook shares. The coverage added up to eight pages of links—just think of how many views, clicks, and shares that is. I was hoping for fifty thousand pageviews for the whole thing. Cumulatively, it did millions. I hoped for a couple blog pickups. We got coverage in two hundred-plus outlets. Not only did I get all this press for free, but Forbes.com paid me a thousand dollars cash for my share of the pageviews the controversy generated.
So who is the real troll here? Me, or my friends in the media?
A click is a click and a pageview is a pageview. A blogger doesn’t care how they get it. Their bosses don’t care. They just want it.*
The headline is there to get you to view the article, end of story. Whether you get anything out of it after is irrelevant—the click already happened. A comments section is meant to be used. So are those share buttons at the bottom of every post. The dirty truth, the brilliant writer Venkatesh Rao pointed out, is that
social media isn’t a set of tools to allow humans to communicate with humans. It is a set of embedding mechanisms to allow technologies to use humans to communicate with each other, in an orgy of self-organizing. . . . The Matrix had it wrong. You’re not the battery power in a global, human-enslaving AI, you are slightly more valuable. You are part of the switching circuitry.1
As a user, the fact that blogs are unhelpful, deliberately misleading, or unnecessarily incendiary might exhaust and tire you, but Orwell reminded us in 1984: “The weariness of the cell is the vigor of the organism.”
So goes the art of the online publisher: To string the customer along as long as possible, to deliberately not be helpful, is to turn simple readers into pageview-generating machines. Publishers know they have to make each new headline even more irresistible than the last, the next article even more inflammatory or less practical to keep getting clicks. It’s a vicious cycle in which, by screwing the reader and getting screwed by me, they must screw the reader harder next time to top what they did before.
And sure, sometimes people get mad when they realize they’ve been tricked. Readers don’t like to learn that the story they read was baseless. Readers get pissed when they find out the link they clicked was for some sponsored content. Bloggers aren’t pleased when they fall for a hoax. But this is a calculated risk bloggers and I both take, mostly because the consequences are so low. In the rare cases we’re caught red-handed, it’s not like we have to give the money we made back. As Juvenal joked, “What’s infamy matter if you can keep your fortune?”
*Or they ask you to use Facebook as your login so they can better target you to advertisers.
*As Richard Greenblatt—maybe the greatest hacker who has ever lived—told Wired in 2010, “There’s a dynamic now that says, let’s format our web page so people have to push the button a lot so that they’ll see lots of ads. Basically, the people who win are those who manage to make things the most inconvenient for you.”