Smith depicts Denton and Peretti as rivals, but they’re not playing precisely the same game. Two years later, the same thing would happen with posts that made users shriek “Trump!” A cortisol-spiking post that made hordes of reply guys shriek “Wyoming!”? Facebook blasted it to everyone. When the quiz became BuzzFeed’s most successful post, Peretti, then the company’s chief executive, pinged a Facebook staffer, who explained that the platform had a new algorithm for promoting posts: Facebook was now pushing content that attracted high engagement numbers, and a comment carried four times the weight of a “like.” Lazy, bemused clicks were yesterday’s metrics the platform wanted garrulous comment sections. The Wyoming quiz’s eureka moment belonged to Peretti. “Traffic” is instead a picaresque, set among the muckrakers, Jezebels, dweebs, addicts and wing nuts of Silicon Alley, the notional New York City tech zone that runs, in theory, from Flatiron to Dumbo.
In unfolding the tale of Gawker, HuffPost and BuzzFeed - the new-media ventures that, he argues, conspired to invent virality - Smith largely resists the temptation to claim that anything in his experience changed the world forever.
Co-founder of Semafor, former New York Times media columnist, onetime editor in chief of BuzzFeed News. Man-about-media, ironist by nature and trade. Then, according to Ben Smith in his engrossing and suspenseful book, “Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral,” the team at BuzzFeed noticed something that changed media forev. Too many people got Wyoming - more than actually lived in Wyoming - and this turn of events was so exciting that people stomped over to Facebook to protest. These quizzes were plenty diverting, and in the early days people shared them like joints or sparklers.īut this particular quiz had a bug. Select a party anthem (“YMCA”), a quality in a dream partner (“ravenous”) and presto: your spiritual home.
The “actually” seemed to promise a solid, data-driven answer. 13, 2014, a bored-at-work BuzzFeed quiz ricocheted around the web: “ What State Do You Actually Belong In?” TRAFFIC: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, by Ben Smith
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