The story of the viral internet, as Ben Smith tells it in his new book Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, begins in 2001 with future BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti in an ill-fitting blazer, waiting to go on the Today show to explain a prank: he had tried to get Nike to make him custom shoes that said “sweatshop” on them, Nike turned him down, and the resulting email thread, when published, set the internet alight. More horseplay ensued, until there seemed to be enough for an entire website: BuzzFeed, a soupy mélange of viral clickbait, personality quizzes, and esoteric internet reporting. Unlike existing media properties, BuzzFeed’s brilliance was that it was specifically reverse engineered to be a site that favored pageviews above content. It didn’t necessarily matter if the content was good, per se. It only mattered if it clicked.
Smith is a smart guy, a good reporter, and exudes an endearing—and enduring—earnestness about the media. As the cofounder and editor-in-chief of the new website Semafor, he’s shown gumption in getting a news organization off the ground in hostile economic times. As the former media columnist for the New York Times, he tried his hand at chronicling downtown New York subcultures and how digital ads are making a comeback (remains to be seen). As the editor in chief of BuzzFeed News, he took an enterprise known for quizzes that told you which Disney character you were and expanded it into a legitimate journalistic juggernaut. In Traffic, oddly, he recounts the industry-reshaping history of viral journalism—mostly at BuzzFeed and Gawker—from a removed perspective, as if he’s convinced he’s a neutral reporter rather than a central protagonist.
I didn’t quite expect this book to be funny—the absurdity of the early aughts internet is enough on its own—but at least that it would be juicy. The untold number of illegal stimulants that went into building the viral internet, the scads of interoffice dick pics, the terrible pay. It’s not, which is disappointing. The lack of juice, however, means that the book doesn’t truly engage with the dirty business of how all this traffic got created in the first place, and who created it.
Perhaps to go there would open up a whole other can of worms, and I suppose the qualities I admire in Ben don’t lend themselves to telling that story. He was a newsroom leader, not a peon shoveling memes into a CMS. And so we get a narrative that reads at once like a plea for David Fincher to option it and a benign mea culpa. Was writing this an act of bravery, or self-delusion? At times I feel like Ben is almost being genuinely contrite, but he ultimately emerges as a cipher, and one who now walks through the world a richer man, seemingly unencumbered by the wrath traffic wrought.