The most heartbreaking moment in Traffic is one of Denton coolly withdrawing his esteem for one of those writers. Yet there was real affection in the way his writers wrote about him, as a withholding daddy, as an admirably evil genius, as the king of the trolls. Indeed, Denton, a sub-replacement-level blogger when he took the reins himself, excelled at the role of provocateur boss: tweaking his own writers in the comments and paying out bonuses based on the real-time traffic scoreboards he installed in the Gawker Media offices. “Do you really need to do so many posts about periods or abortion or rape?” he asked Holmes, who ignored him-who could afford to ignore him because, by his own standard, Jezebel was a content-validating success, exceeding a million page views a month within a year of the site’s 2007 launch.ĭenton now jokes about his bad-cop interactions with the staff at Gawker’s many sites: “A lot of it was theater-wasn’t it?” he asks Smith. And they did all this despite Denton’s concerns that feminism, as a subject, was a traffic-killer. Smith identifies what felt new about the site’s merging of intersectional identity with journalism, and shrewdly points out how it paved the way for the mainstreaming of new ways of thinking about feminism-and, not incidentally, laid the groundwork for #MeToo. He’s right, for example, to devote a chapter to Gawker Media’s Jezebel in its first year, when the site’s swashbuckling writers brought to life editor Anna Holmes’ goal to entertainingly critique not just the women’s magazine industry but an entire sexist media culture that silenced women’s real stories, bodies, and souls. Smith’s particularly good when he close-reads a particular publication in its ephemeral context. Through Denton and Peretti, Smith attempts to tell the entire 21 st-century story of online media, and quite a bit of that story ends up in the book. To the young writers he met at the downtown bar the Magician, Denton “loomed large,” Smith writes, “in the way that the older guy buying the drinks can.” He came to New York in 2002, a 35-year-old entrepreneur fleeing the first great Silicon Valley bust with an eye toward taking blogging into the mainstream. He rewarded quality, that is to say, with his own traffic. “He was famous for not committing to a Friday- or Saturday-night plan unless he could be certain that he had alighted on the best option,” according to a high school friend. An alleged photo of Brett Favre’s dick, for example.ĭenton grew up in London as the child of a mother who survived the Holocaust in Hungary and a father who oversaw a government-owned country retreat, an outsider who was also an insider: Jewish but part of the establishment, closeted but popular. Peretti’s view of traffic as an elemental force that, with rigorous effort, can be bent to one’s whims is at odds with that of the book’s other subject, Nick Denton, the onetime king of Gawker Media, who viewed traffic as a reward for editorial quality, albeit not always the kinds of editorial quality everyone could agree on. Traffic follows Peretti from MIT to the Huffington Post and then to BuzzFeed, the media company he founded, led into the promised land, and then struggled to keep afloat. It will carry you along until it inevitably recedes, leaving you beached in a new place. Somewhere else, that parallel world, the wave of traffic continues to build, and a version of you is still riding it or, more likely, being overwhelmed by it. But that conversation does not stop, even if you’re no longer participating in it.
You may step away from your computer, or put away your phone, and forget for a moment that something enormous is happening to you-something that might define you in the minds of untold thousands, something that might deliver opportunity or danger or boost your career or torpedo it. Most people are able, most of the time, to ignore this split. This is always disconcerting, because what is so unusual about the experience of going viral, so uniquely modern, is that it makes concrete the deranging split the self undergoes in the 21 st century, between one’s online identity and one’s physical body. The virality had escaped the internet and had come back to me IRL. “That was quite an interview,” a neighbor told me while grabbing a drink that Friday afternoon.
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