Blogs
Truth vs. traffic: An age-old battle
I know there’s probably been enough sturm und drang about Fred Wilson’s post on journabloggers and Mike Arrington’s response, in which he calls Fred “hypocritical, wrong and conflicted,” but there’s an undercurrent behind the furore that I’ve been thinking about a fair bit. Tony Hung puts his finger on it in this post, and Andy Beard mentions it in his as well. It’s the old “truth vs. traffic” dilemma, and while bloggers like to think that it was invented by the Web, it’s probably as old as journalism itself.
To recap: Tony says that Mike is using a blog/nerd fight to his advantage for traffic reasons, and that when TechCrunch or any other blog is controversial, they win (i.e., they get linked high on Techmeme and they get more traffic as a result). Mike also says in a comment on his own post that:
“we’ve found that the “hits” - the blog posts that generate a lot of discussion - are the ones that drive all stats, including, indirectly, monetization. The problem is knowing what’s a hit and what isn’t before it actually happens.”
and in a comment on Fred’s post:
“here’s a secret - a lot of what we write about generates the traffic. And every day I sneak in a bunch of posts about startups that get the benefit of that traffic.”
Mike also told me last year — when I interviewed him as part of a mesh conference keynote — that he always wants to be first, because if he’s not first then “it’s a lot more work.” Does that mean he is willing to jump into print with something quickly even if he hasn’t pinned it down 100 per cent? He admitted that it does (although he also made the point that trust must be gained over time, and can be easily lost).
But in making that admission, and talking about traffic as a motivator, all Mike is really doing is admitting to the same impulse that newspaper editors have been driven by for the past 100 years or so. In fact, the early days of newspapers — when there were hundreds of scandal sheets and political bully-pulpit rags pushing their respective biases — resembled nothing so much as the current state of the blogosphere.
That tradition continues today with tabloids like the New York Post and the Daily Mail in the UK, and with blogs like TMZ and PerezHilton.com. Got a hot rumour? Print it first, ask questions later. Even reputable newspapers can fall prey to that impulse: I remember a story that hit the front pages of dozens of British papers (as well as my own paper) about a guy who made custom wooden gibbets for hanging prisoners, and claimed to have sold them to various African despots.
It was a great story — except that it turned out to be complete fiction. Did we or the other papers check it out before printing it? Sure. But maybe we didn’t check quite as hard as we might have, because it was such a great story. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not comparing Mike Arrington to a tabloid or a scandal sheet or anything of the sort. I’m just saying that the quest for traffic, and the tension between that and “the truth,” is not a new one invented by the blogosphere. It goes on all around us.
license
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.
subscribe
grazr
TwitterCount
busted tees
Discussion
Comments for “Truth vs. traffic: An age-old battle”
Add New Comment
Viewing 6 Comments
Thanks. Your comment is awaiting approval by a moderator.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
No?
That's too bad because if you did, it would raise a huge stink, setting the table for another nerd fight, and it would also be the logical extension of this conversation.
:)
No, seriously. Good point. While I was thinking about Mad Cow disease earlier today (totally different topic), I kept on thinking about what all of this meant for the standards that we set for ourselves, when the drive for controversy is essentially a race towards the bottom.
Oh, sure, there's a self-correcting mechanism in place so that we need to have some kind of integrity (lest we be called out by fellow bloggers), but by its very nature blogging (and the reality of how and what people like to read on the Internet) doesn't really reward thoughtful, balanced and nuanced analysis -- if by "reward" you mean traffic.
t @ dji
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
rewarded with huge traffic, Tony, but I have to believe that over time
people will tend to gravitate towards the more trustworthy (and
perhaps thoughtful) blogs. I have to believe it because if I thought
otherwise then I might just stop writing altogether :-)
And it's interesting to note that the more newspapers and magazines
and other media move online, the more they are subject to the same
kinds of traffic-driven concerns and tensions between what they want
to cover or write about and what their server logs tell them people
want to read about.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Or, alternatively, Nick Denton's traffic-based renumeration formula for Gawker.
People act rationally. When you have a stake in things that are strictly based on eyeballs and attention, you obviously do things to get that attention, without trying to compromise your integrity -- too much.
Which is probably what you mean by "tension". :)
Cheers
t @ dji
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
They don't because they know that would make boring reading & bloggers know that there's no point in having the best blog in the sphere with no-one reading it.
So here's where 'tension' & drawing a line in the middle comes in. It isn't the product of the blogger but the product of the readers which the blogger wants to keep. Readers want quality & trustworthy blogs, but they don't want them to be boring either.
Add New Comment
Trackbacks