Book Review: Traffic by Ben Smith
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A few weeks ago I went into my local independent bookstore and asked them whether they had a copy of Traffic, the new book by former BuzzFeed News supremo Ben Smith. They didn’t — it turns out that not everyone in south London is as interested in digital media schadenfreude as I am — but they offered to order it in for me. “How much is it?” I asked. “£26.99,” the bookseller replied. “£26.99?!” I yelped in return. “What do you think I am? An early investor in BuzzFeed?!?”
Instead I purchased Traffic for the princely sum of one (1) Audible credit — the only form of cryptocurrency I possess or will endorse. So this “review” will not contain any quotes, because I don’t have the text to hand. But I will synthesise my learnings from, and thoughts on, a book subtitled “Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral”.
If you were inclined to do so you could split the 352 pages of Traffic into two sections. The first is a group biography of the gang of early-00s internet pioneers, predominantly Jonah Peretti and Nick Denton, who founded the sites BuzzFeed and Gawker. Other characters — Ariana Huffington, Andrew Breitbart, Eli Pariser, etc — come and go, but Jonah and Nick are constant from beginning to end. And the origin stories of both BuzzFeed and Gawker are interesting. BuzzFeed began life as a project in performance virality, fostered by the media lab at MIT, while Gawker was the power fantasy of a double immigrant (Denton, the British-born son of a Hungarian Jew, transplanted to the US). But about halfway through the story of Traffic something curious happens: Smith himself enters the fray, having been hired by Peretti to lead BuzzFeed’s credibility establishing news project. And so the latter part is more memoir than biography.
Genius, rivalry and delusion: for Smith the story has all three. The genius part is predominantly in his old boss Peretti’s ability to pre-empt trends in internet culture (although at what point prediction becomes a more circular fulfilment, Smith seems unsure). The early days of BuzzFeed now look rather quaint (Smith, like many from the BuzzFeed stable, is singularly vexed by the rise of Trumpist populism and the fact that some of the most prominent right-wing online voices, like Benny Johnson and “Baked Alaska”, were ex-BuzzFeed) while Gawker looks positively prehistoric. In 2023 it would be hard to attribute any conventional notion of “genius” to the predilection of Denton et al for publishing celebrity sex tapes, dick pics and other tawdry ephemera. But that’s changing social mores for you; at the time it was cutting edge and incendiary.
Rivalry, meanwhile, is at the core of the story, as Smith frames it. Peretti’s college bet on his ability to shape the world via digital media bookends Smith’s narrative, but more compelling is the foundational bitchiness of media technologists. The delusion is essential to that: not just in Denton’s belief that he could violate the privacy of some of the richest and most powerful people in the world (including Peter Thiel, who would ultimately destroy his little empire) but in Peretti’s decision to turn down acquisition offers from both Disney and Facebook. The delusion — which could possibly be reframed as “self-confidence” — is central to the belief that they weren’t just asking people to get hysterical about the colour of a dress, but were, somehow, changing the world.
The reason I found Traffic such an interesting read is essentially twofold. Firstly, its publication has rather inconveniently (the book references recent job cuts at the old firm, but not this specific development) coincided with the closing of BuzzFeed News. Traffic outlines the simple causes of this failure: the news project emerged from a dual desire to appear credible to legacy media and to appeal to advertisers who were put off by crummy listicles. But as the the business evolved into a more aggressive strategy of banner ads and sponsored posts, the news operation became a drag anchor, subsidised by the rest of the business (which was not exactly in rude health itself). Smith remains ultimately sympathetic to his old boss — and extremely sympathetic to the project he oversaw — but concedes the intractability of these problems.
The second reason it’s interesting is Smith himself. In 2020 he left BuzzFeed News (cue New Yorker style cartoon involving a rat and a sinking ship, if you must) and headed over to the New York Times. Smith himself paints this transition in an intriguing light, marking the sea change that happened in the last decade as print dinosaurs caught up with the digital dodos. After just two years as media editor of the Times, Smith left in 2022 to start Semafor with Justin Smith (no relation), formerly a Bloomberg CEO. Semafor, which is still in its early days, has attracted significant investment and a top team of writers, including David Weigel, Reed Albergotti, and Gina Chua.
What’s striking about Semafor is how much the design and tone of the publication seems influenced by Smith’s two years at the New York Times, and how little seems impacted by his near decade at BuzzFeed. Sure, under the hood there are doubtless technological innovations that are straight out of the BuzzFeed playbook (Peretti was an early pioneer of much of the measurement standards that have become ubiquitous in the modern media workplace). But take a look at the homepage — semafor.com — and then tell me another new media startup so obviously influenced by old newspaper ideas. Even the colouring, a sort of sandy beige (roughly the same colour that I see the Financial Times as being, even though people insist that it’s pink), breaks the mould of the long tradition of black-on-white digital printing. When the story of Semafor comes to be told, I wonder how those early meetings between Smith & Smith will be depicted? A scheme to fuse BuzzFeed’s inherent virality with the Times’ credibility? Or just another swing at founding the next, and perhaps last, billion dollar legacy media brand?
One of the big omissions from Traffic is a proper existential consideration of its premise. There’s much handwringing and self-flagellation about fomenting the conditions for populism (a claim that comes across as, inadvertently, a touch self-congratulatory, as most of those conditions existed with or without BuzzFeed and Gawker) but little about the core premise. What is the point of traffic? What is the point of going viral? There’s plenty of discussion about the disjunct between what readers would enjoy and what advertisers would pay for, but scant interrogation of what the ultimate goal was. Because BuzzFeed’s pursuit of traffic came at a significant cost to its industry — a sort-of mindless hyperinflation of the “read”. The end of the dot-com era, the 2008 final crash, and the tech boom all fuelled the conditions for BuzzFeed to pursue traffic, as though it were the most important thing in the world, while the rest of the global economy largely ignored that metric. In no small part thanks to BuzzFeed, cost-per-impression advertising revenue is deep in the basement.
This is a modern parable, and one that can be applied to, say, Uber or Easyjet or Deliveroo or WeWork or Chelsea Football Club. Retrofitting a business model onto a customer base has never been harder. It’s why it’s hard to see much genius in the story of BuzzFeed, Gawker, HuffPo, Jezebel, Deadspin, Upworthy and the rest. Using traffic as your main KPI is a bit like me setting out to lick a thousand doorknobs in London. Sure, it’s doable, but what’s the point? Some of my more simple-minded shareholders might be impressed with my doorknob licking prowess, but mainly I’ll have achieved something fairly useless — and probably acquired a parasite or two in the process.
The era that Traffic depicts is not over. Far from. There has, of course, been a shift in the way that upstart, quasi-civilian, journalism has been constructed in recent years. More audio-visual, more paywalled at point of entry. But podcasts and YouTube, Substack and Medium; all have learnt from the viral years. Because the essence of virality was its servitude. BuzzFeed, like Upworthy, has been entirely indentured to the fortunes of Facebook. As Smith depicts, even the subtlest of changes to the newsfeed algorithm could have disastrous business consequences. As Facebook’s influence has waned, BuzzFeed has become more reliant on its sibling, Instagram, but the act of servitude still exists. It is — not unlike the discotheque in my digestive tract after all that doorknob licking — a parasitic relationship.
If the original sin of the internet was not getting people to pay for it, then the secondary sin has been staking such vast swathes of the digital economy on the fickle fortunes and fancies of the social media giants. SME owners the world over rightly decry the way that Amazon does business: it has created the biggest marketplace in the world, encourages, via necessity, vendors to operate there, and then harnesses the data about their sales in order to undercut them. But the relationship of journalism, small business owners, artists, musicians, streamers, manufacturers, everyone, with social media is really not so different. The relationship is not symbiotic, it’s monodirectional. BuzzFeed needs Facebook in order to survive, in order to reward its shareholders, in order to pay its staff. Facebook doesn’t need BuzzFeed at all. Users will always input content and output attention. The wheel keeps turning.
And so the biggest takeaway from Traffic is one about the pointlessness of so many pursuits. If, after 350 pages, it’s still not clear what the ultimate end goal of wooing all this traffic was, then probably it was never that transparent. Traffic for traffic’s sake, after all, is an ignoble pursuit.
