Summary of Traffic by Ben Smith: Genius, Rivalry,and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral

By GP SUMMARY

DISCLAIMER

 

This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

 

Summary of Traffic by Ben Smith: Genius, Rivalry,and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral

 

IN THIS SUMMARIZED BOOK, YOU WILL GET:

 

• Chapter astute outline of the main contents.
• Fast & simple understanding of the content analysis.
• Exceptionally summarized content that you may skip in the original book

 

 

Ben Smith's Traffic is the story of two online media rivals, Jonah Peretti of HuffPost and BuzzFeed and Nick Denton of Gawker Media, whose pursuit of attention at scale helped release the dark forces that would overtake the internet and American society. It explores one of the great ironies of our time: the internet, which was going to help the left remake the world in its image, has become the motive force of right populism. It is essential and enthralling reading to understand how we got here.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookRix
• Release date: May 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9783755441182

Book preview

Page Title

Summary of Traffic

A

Summary of Ben Smith’s Book

Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion

in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral

GP SUMMARY

Summary of Traffic by Ben Smith: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral

By GP SUMMARY© 2023, GP SUMMARY.

All rights reserved.

Author: GP SUMMARY

Contact: [e-mail]

Cover, illustration: GP SUMMARY

Editing, proofreading: GP SUMMARY

Other collaborators: GP SUMMARY

NOTE TO READERS

This is an unofficial summary & analysis of Ben Smith’s Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral designed to enrich your reading experience.

DISCLAIMER

The contents of the summary are not intended to replace the original book. It is meant as a supplement to enhance the reader's understanding. The contents within can neither be stored electronically, transferred, nor kept in a database. Neither part nor full can the document be copied, scanned, faxed, or retained without the approval from the publisher or creator.

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Copyright 2023. All rights reserved.

The Bet

Jonah Peretti and Cameron Marlow were best friends at grad school and betted on everything. When Jonah went viral for the first time on January 5, 2001, his friend and rival wouldn't let him bask in his glory. Jonah suggested a two-dollar bet and spent the next twenty years trying to win it. On New Year's Day, Jonah was on Nike.com looking at sneakers and typing fuck into the white box. The site blocked it.

Jonah attempted to use the word sweatshop in his submission to Nike, but was rejected. He then submitted the exchange to Harper's Magazine, hoping to reach the Harper's Readings section. The magazine declined, so Jonah forwarded the email to ten friends, who forwarded it to MetaFilter and Slashdot. Over the next few weeks, the email traveled from inbox to inbox, becoming a catchy corporate protest. On February 28, 2001, Jonah told Katie Couric that he had read some bad things about Nike's labor practices.

Jonah was a student at MIT who had been studying human behavior since kindergarten, when his mother enrolled him in the Oakland public school system. When Katie Couric asked him about sweatshops, he thought Couric could sense his weakness and read his line to a Nike spokesman. The spokesman defended his company's labor practices while thanking Jonah for calling attention to Nike's foray onto the internet. Jonah walked off the set feeling like an imposter and decided to devote his career to collecting and quantifying traffic, which could hold Nike to account over its labor practices or just sell sneakers. Jonah was diagnosed with dyslexia and enrolled in special ed.

His mother, Della, worried about the dire fate of smart, angry kids who never learned to read. Jonah took a pottery class to absorb his anger, desire for freedom, and intelligence. In seventh grade, he left his neighborhood school for Claremont Middle School, where he was an outsider. Della used money she inherited from her father to pull him out of public school for high school, sending him to the College Preparatory School. His classmates recalled a sweet-natured student whose competitive edge came out mostly through sports.

His friend Romesh Ratnesar recognized his extreme gifts and went on to Stanford and Time magazine. Jonah applied to the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he majored in environmental studies and gravitated towards the more abstract spaces of the History of Consciousness program. He read Marx, Kant and Freud, and was one of the male teaching assistants in an Introduction to Women’s Studies class. His favorite professor was Donna Haraway, a creator of cyberfeminism and the author of the famous Cyborg Manifesto. Jonah struggled to merge his playful interest in media with loftier ideas about late-stage capitalism. Jonah Jonah was a young academic who published an article in Negations about the links between capitalism, media, and identity formation.

After college, he took a detour and applied to the MIT Media Lab, where he was rejected the first time. He returned to Cambridge to measure the same substance the Nike spokesman had touted: traffic. He found the camera's gaze personally uncomfortable and cared too much about the medium to fully embrace the message, so he turned down an opportunity to endorse a union-made line of golf T-shirts. Jonah made two charts that showed the exponential rise in traffic to a prank and Shey's website. Cameron's research focused on Blogdex, a new tool that could track, measure, and map internet conversations.

The numbers were small, but they ignited a fire that scorched a giant corporation's multimillion-dollar marketing campaign. Jonah drafted an analysis of the sweatshop episode and wrote a guide for activists. Cameron was skeptical and betted Jonah that he could never replicate his success. Jonah leapt to take the bet and went to downtown Manhattan to prove himself in the nascent new media scene.

Traffic Control

Jonah moved to New York in 2001 to work for John Johnson's art-and-tech not-for-profit, Eyebeam. He rented a sixthfloor walk-up over a hipster Cuban restaurant and began to figure out his next viral prank. Nick Denton arrived the next spring and set out on a relentless project of garnering thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of page views for his blogs. Nick told Cameron of his plans to build a new kind of company in New York that would merge the insights of technology with the social connections of media, all in the service of getting at the truth. Blogdex initially operated from a server underneath Cameron's desk in the Cube, jacked directly into MIT's internet backbone.

The software used to create an automated index of internet relevance turned the social substance of media into data. Nick offered Cameron $2,000 a month and a rent-free apartment to help him build a large-scale blogging aggregation platform that would give individual bloggers the capacity to link to and feed one another. Nick was born in London in 1966 and had the ideal qualities of a revolutionary: a deep understanding of the status quo and an elemental desire to burn it down. Nick Denton had a plausible claim to membership in the British Establishment due to his father, Geoffrey Denton, who ran Wilton Park, a grand old British country estate south of London. His mother, Marika Denton, was a Hungarian who escaped the Holocaust with her own mother when she was eighteen.

Nick identified most strongly with his grandmother, Anna Bernholz, who had been raised in a Jewish orphanage in Vienna and built a raincoat-selling business that was confiscated by the fascists and Communists. Nick was a Hungarian Jew who attended the University College School in North London. He was remote, a little Machiavellian, and calculating. He chose to be an outsider and went to Hungary to practice his trade as a journalist. He then moved to San Francisco to cover the tech boom, but instead found himself wanting to join it.

He wrote a colorful portrait of the startup scene in all its flawed glory. Nick is leaving the Financial Times after eight years as a journalist