Ben Smith on the End of an Era for Digital Media

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1:25Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Gia Weisenthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, there's been a lot of media news, and it's a cliche, and I'm sure it's been repeated over and over again in headlines, but we're at like the end of an era for like the era of journalism that we both came up in. I feel like before we start this episode, we should just get the disclaimer out right away, which is this is probably going to be our most navel-gazing episode ever. Yes. And I think we're even planning on releasing this as like a Friday bonus episode of the week just to acknowledge that it's like, OK, if you don't want to know anything about the media business or Joe and Tracy or all these things that are sort of like endemic to their lives over the last decade, feel free to skip this one.

2:12Yeah, this is media talking about the media. But you are right. There have been some things that have been happening lately. Specifically, we've seen BuzzFeed News announcing that it will be shutting down. I think there was a report recently about Vice Media potentially filing for bankruptcy. It feels like the end of an era for a lot of these digital-focused media startups. No, I mean, it's definitely true. And, you know, as listeners do know, we both started our careers sort of in digital, basically, roughly the same time, basically right at the worst of the great financial crisis. And out of this period came all of these new experiments and, you know, upstart media companies that were supposed to dislodge the incumbent, you know, the blog at FT.

3:01At the Financial Times, Alphaville, yeah. I was at Insider. And Insider is still chugging. They recently, they did announce layoffs, but of all of the companies, maybe we'll talk about this. Of all the companies, I kind of feel like they're like the winner that nobody talks about in this whole thing. I noticed you call it Insider and not its original name. Have you just erased that from your mind? Do you know what the original name was? Was it not Clusterstock? It was, yeah. Yeah, Clusterstock. Because everyone was like, all right, Business Insider, but we had names even before then. And even before then was Silicon Alley Insider.

3:31Anyway, it's a pretty pivotal time. And, you know, I guess the question for was this all a Zirp phenomenon or was this something else or like what was going on there? Well, I think there is an overlap with some of the bigger, you know, I might be reaching here, but I think there is an overlap with some of the bigger themes we've been talking about recently, which is, I guess, the sort of attrition of tech or the tech strains that we've seen. And the thing that digital media has in common with a lot of the tech industry has to be venture capital financing. It has to be there was a story about what was going to happen in the digital media market.

4:08You know, people talked about these big numbers, huge audiences that could now be reached through online publishing. So it feels like there is some overlap there. Yeah. And of course, you know, when I was a business insider, like there was a really intense pressure month after month to hit new traffic goals. And part of that was like clearly like ad sales, right? They're like sort of on some level a function of traffic. But I think the other thing is they're a function of telling a story to your investors. for your next round. Yeah, you have lots of lines going up. Lots of lines. And so regardless of whether you're actually profitable or not at any given moment, if the lines are up, you can live because you can get that next round of funding.

4:48Classic tech growth story. Exactly. Well, we're going to talk all about this because we're going to be speaking with Ben Smith. He is the editor in chief and co-founder of Semaphore. Previously, he was a media columnist at the New York Times. And previous to that, he was the editor in chief at the aforementioned BuzzFeed News, which changed the world. And he's the author of the new book, Traffic, Genius Rivalry in the Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral. So Ben, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. Thank you so much for having me. And I should say, as a genuine fan and listener of the show, I can't imagine that anybody does not want to know all the details of their lives.

5:24I certainly do. Thank you so much for saying that on air. I have a question, which is, why did BuzzFeed News exist? And the reason I ask specifically is that in my mind, as a competitor to it, when I was an insider for several years, my perception was that BuzzFeed itself was this huge traffic monster, cultural juggernaut. Everyone knows about the quizzes, et cetera. And that BuzzFeed News was there to, like, raise the prestige of the brand maybe for advertisers. Is that correct? Like, why did it exist? So that's partially correct, but I think you have to put your head back to 2011, 2012 when we started it.

6:03When the kind of thesis that we were working on was that, in part, that the Facebook news feed was this central pillar of society and people loved it. People loved the idea that quizzes, that memes, that baby pictures from your friends were all mixed up together. and at BuzzFeed among other things they'd noticed that on big news days their traffic went down and so both in a and so both kind of in a functional sense that was part of this mix that again the people liked that this stuff was all mixed together and so it was part of the mix that I think Jonah and the Peretti the founder thought people wanted but also BuzzFeed was you say it was a cultural juggernaut but actually it was struggling for relevance it was part it was halfway to feel this being seen by advertisers and by the platforms and by everybody else as a media company halfway to being seen as being like nine gag or like break.com or like a generation of you know cheeseburger a generation of an earlier generation of essentially meme sites that got wiped out in that era because the platforms considered them spam well i was gonna ask how much did the content mix become a problem for buzzfeed overall because it was trying to do something kind of unusual in the sense that it was trying to do very important, sometimes investigative journalism, you know, hard news, while at the same time publishing memes and, you know, like 10 of the best random products you can buy off of Amazon kind of lists.

7:32Yeah, you know, in this moment of which, again, this very kind of optimistic and fresh moment of social media in 2012, it seemed plausible that people liked the mix, the consumers, liked the mix actually and that the same people who liked memes wanted to get hard news and wanted to get them in the same place which was to say facebook slash buzzfeed i think as you suggest in the question that really starts to change like news got less fun as the decade wore on not from some technical perspective but because in fact like there was this huge rise of right-wing populism of left-wing populism of super confrontational public politics playing out through people screaming at each other on social media and suddenly this idea that the facebook feed is this delightful mix of all these different things kind of curdled and I think that was a huge problem for us that we never totally found our way out of.

8:20Right so you had this like weird mix of maybe the ultra-right talking about fascism and then like 10 clapback tweets that you've never seen before and they kind of sit badly alongside each other? Well no more you have a list of like you know things you only knew if you grew up Persian in New Jersey and a bunch of cute cats and a story about Donald Trump and the reactions to that story about Donald Trump are totally polarizing. Oh, I see. Okay. And maybe, you know, and maybe there's always this huge brand problem in question that like BuzzFeed News, it's like calling something like, I don't know, Disney News or something.

8:55Like it's a weird brand. But there was a window in which we leaned into it and people liked it. And then I think the broader social forces changed and turned against that. None of this speaks to the business model or anything else, but that was a real, You could feel as Trump rose, you could kind of feel the weather change and feel that brand get worse. Well, man, there's a lot there. I hadn't really thought about that element, though, that like basically people just got angrier with each other, you know, at the end of the 2010s than they were at the beginning of the 2010s. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the story of Facebook and BuzzFeed was – end of Twitter and BuzzFeed was a big bet on news being distributed by social media.

9:36You know, just on this brand question, we can sort of pivot. You know, when I was at Insider, I always sort of felt this sort of like, you know, my boss, then Henry Blodgett, again, winner of this whole era, in my opinion, and completely brilliant media executive. But I also sort of felt like this, like, well, I mean, I guess the question is like, to some extent, if you're like going up against the New York Times or the Washington Post or Bloomberg News, et cetera, does the existence of the sort of like meme side of the operation create some sort of like hard cap in terms of really how far you can go with like prestige?

10:18prestige. I mean, because I got the sense that inside of that on some level, that you could like win Pulitzers and do great work, etc. But on some level, you kind of have to pick one or the other. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think that there was a path for BuzzFeed where it's best. Or maybe I'm somebody who I actually like think prestige is overrated, and sometimes counterproductive. But there's, you know, there was journalism you could do that was particularly focused on stuff that the majority young women who were sharing memes cared about a lot, which could be like sexual assault at Massage Envy, for instance, was something we wrote about.

10:52I think at our best, we were like a lot of the coverage, you know, was in sync with the people who were reading the site and was really hard hitting journalism that also overlapped with the interests of regular people reading BuzzFeed.

11:13Thank you.

11:43AI is not replacing American workers or flattening them into conformity. It's unleashing what makes each one irreplaceable. Their judgment, their craft, their creativity. When American workers become more powerfully themselves, they own the future. Palantir, making Americans irreplaceable. Hey, this is LeVar Arrington from Two Pros and a Cup of Joe. Toyota is moving toward a more sustainable future by giving you the freedom to choose from an incredible lineup of trucks now available in both gas and hybrid models, including the legendary Tacoma and the powerful Tundra, both available with the iForce Max Hybrid powertrain and backed by Toyota's legendary reputation for reliability and value.

12:32In fact, for 2025, Toyota is the best resale value brand for the fifth year in a row, According to the Kelly Blue Book, KBB.com with Tacoma ranked number one, holding the highest projected retained value of any vehicle. Choosing Toyota means having more options and less compromise. So visit buyatoyota.com for a great deal on an efficient Toyota today. Vehicle's projected resale value is specific to the 2025 model year. For more information, visit Kelly Blue Book's KBB.com. Toyota, let's go places. Talk to us about how we, I mean, the book is called Traffic. So I assume you have a lot of opinions on the importance of traffic and how it works.

13:20But talk to us maybe specifically about how that fed, you know, the lines going up on the chart, how that fed into the business model and shaped the offering. How were people thinking about traffic as a monetizable commodity back then? Yeah, and I spent a lot of time in the book and a lot of the reporting of the book for me particularly was on the stuff that happened before I got there, which is to say, kind of the discovery of traffic in the mid-aughts by the folks at your team at Insider a little bit later, but early on by Jonah Peretti, who was then at Huffington Post and Nick Denton at Gawker.

13:57and it's interesting you use the word commodity because they really did think it was a commodity it was something where they could you know for every individual who clicked on their sites they could get something like a nine dollar cpm which is a pretty good rate then and sadly now i mean they had cpm is uh for a thousand it costs for nine dollars for a thousand clicks yeah okay and they had i think every reason to think that wow like at this very rudimentary stage of this business we're getting nine dollars for a really crappy product we're gonna make that product way better and we're going to scale it a lot more and if this is a classic commodity we're going to make an enormous amount of money and so they're focused on trafficking they have different theories about it denton who started gawker had this very i did both very ideological guys actually had this theory that traffic is really to be found in kind of like ripping the mask off of society's hypocrisy of your own hypocrisy if your audience wants pornography give them pornography if they want sort of malicious gossip give them that there was in the gawker family there was a porn site called Fleshbot.

14:56But also, if they wanted sort of stuff that appealed to their worst instincts, give them that. Don't make them pretend to be better. And then also sort of rip the mask off traditional journalism and print the sort of mean, sometimes gossipy stuff, or sometimes hard truths that journalists say to each other at a bar, but don't print. So, that's one theory. Jonah's theory was totally different. He saw this kind of just the bubbling of this social media world. And the theory that we had at BuzzFeed. This is Jonah Peretti of BuzzFeed. The founder of Huffington Post and then of BuzzFeed. And what he saw in this social media world, which also was true for a time, was that the stuff that people would share tended to be very positive.

15:34Like you weren't going to go out and, I mean, God forbid, share insane, screamy politics because that would make you look like a crazy person. No one would do that. What you would share on Facebook was, you know, fundraisers for earthquake victims or lists of cute cats. And so he sort of what he built was around an idea at first that people were going to be distributing media themselves hand to hand and doing it in a way that reflected their best selves. So there's very different tactical ideological approaches to the Internet. This is actually something that I wanted to ask you about, which is it feels like the way people thought about traffic is it's always good.

16:13Eyeballs are always good. But it sort of ignores it feels to me today like one way of generating a lot of traffic is through the hate read. You get you know, you have something saying something provocative. You're still going to get a lot of eyeballs on it. But you can't tell whether people are reading that because they think it's a valuable piece of journalism or they're reading it because people like to read those sort of hate-ready, you know, like dog whistle type pieces. How, like, is that something that you ever noticed? Oh, yes. Is there something I ever noticed that people hate? Yes, for sure.

16:47And I would say, though, if you're, you know, if you are thinking of traffic as a commodity, what you're really selling is the white space next to that article. And so you don't care if people love it or hate it. The sort of purest logic of traffic, which turned out, by the way, to be not how it worked and I think not how good editors ever quite saw it. The way I should have phrased the question is, did that eventually impact the business model? You know, I don't think that – it's hard to think of a site that really lived on hate reads. I mean, I'm sure I'm forgetting one. There was something sort of similar.

17:21The marriage announcement section of the New York Times. Yeah, there's that. I mean, there was also there's a site called XO Jane that oh, our producer just in the message thought catalog. Yes, there was a kind of writing and I actually that was basically about having mostly young women write in a totally unselfconscious way about their personal experiences in a way that was torqued by often by kind of sophisticated cynical editors to make them look like horrible people. so people would attack them on the internet. I mean, that to me is one of the really worst forms of internet journalism. It did like lots of damage to these writers in the name of traffic.

17:59And more broadly, it was a kind of, I think, and this came out of Gawker, particularly came out of Jezebel, which I was not a reader at the time in 2007, but was this incredibly high impact piece of internet history that for a time, I think it's actually kind of amazing to look at. They launched in 07 with this, the first thing they do is offer a bounty for anybody who can find an unretouched photograph from a women's magazine. And they get it. They had$10 ,000 and they pay it out and they get an unretouched photo of Faith Hill, which before her freckles and smile lines have been removed. And really like launched this incredibly effective assault on everything that was wrong with women's magazines, the way they distorted the images of people's bodies, there were no black models.

18:42And they also published this very like frank revelatory writing about sex and about women's lives. And they also developed this unbelievably intense and pathological relationship with their commentators that sort of drove them totally nuts. And the commenters felt they owned them and attacked them. And some of the writing was the kind of writing we're talking about where people sort of exposed their own lives and then faced this intense and very personal criticism. and it got enormous amounts of traffic and nick denton who didn't really love the content kept it going because it got so much traffic but um it was both is this early glimpse both at the power of that kind of social media age and then also it had damage is there the emotions it could provoke and how damaging it could be for the writers i want to jump ahead just a like a few years you know it's funny because the day i literally the day before the news came out that buzzfeed news was shutting down.

19:37I was thinking about this sort of now or famous, I guess it was a letter to the editor of The All, where someone is like, I hate my life because I don't work at BuzzFeed. I was literally just sharing this article with someone the day before the news. And the psychological hold that I think like in the BuzzFeed heyday had over everyone else in the media was like extraordinary. The pressure to keep up, the perception. And I think, you know, I think there are reports went all the way up to like you know board level at the new york times like feeling like what are we going to do about this juggernaut it's so innovative they keep coming up with new story types and traffic and influence and all the young people prefer to get the news there but what i'm curious about actually is like what's the date that peaked 2015 so it was basically like that all it was basically like and why 20 like what happened like what was the turning point in I mean, to me, you know, BuzzFeed was this bet, and to some degree, all these companies were a bet, that this new form of distribution was durable and that the economics would work themselves out.

20:43And I think everyone now totally rightly can say this was always idiotic. Maybe it was. But the basic analogy everybody was using was cable. You know, this new form of distribution had been laid out. The people owning the cable lines knew that they needed quality content to populate it. And they reached an economic arrangement where ESPN, CNN, MTV become these great businesses. And that's what I think BuzzFeed and others imagined they would become. And I think 2015 was really where it started to become a little clear, A, that these platforms themselves are pretty fragile and sort of susceptible to all these social pressures.

21:22and B, that they weren't going to move away from their total reliance on user-generated content to create a business for publishers. So just on this note, my impression was always that in addition to the distribution issues that you just mentioned, which we should dig into a little bit further. But one of the big problems here was that the traditional media companies also just got better at doing what a lot of the digital media companies were doing. And, you know, where I worked, Alphaville, it wasn't necessarily a traffic juggernaut, but it was kind of pioneering of a certain type of journalism, certain experiments with, you know, audience engagement and events and things like that.

22:05And what always tended to happen within the Financial Times was that we would do something new and exciting and innovative, and then that would just get replicated by the FT itself. And so it becomes hard to sort of maintain the momentum of having new types of exciting journalism at a constant rate. Yeah, that's a sign of a pretty healthy organization, basically. But there was this arrogance that really came out of the aughts where we were looking at the New York Times, at CBS News. And it just seemed so clear that they were doomed, that they could never figure out digital media, that their leadership just was terrified of it and had no idea what was going on.

22:44And I think this arrogance lasted long past its expiry date. And we just published on Semaphore an excerpt from my book of when Jonah Peretti is invited into the New York Times in 2015 to tell them how to do their jobs. And he's speaking to a board meeting and the interviewer asks him what he would do if he was named CEO of the New York Times. And he says, well, first, I would ask you for a raise. And then second, I would go into my office, shut my door and cry. Yeah. That's a lot of hubris. Yeah, but you know what? Actually, by then, the Times had started to figure it out and they didn't follow fast.

23:18And in fact, a number of traditional media companies, I'm thinking of the Washington Post, had really screwed themselves by trying to follow fast. Like they had copied this thing and that thing in blogs and never really built anything. The times followed slowly and carefully, but very, very deliberately and very effectively. And I think suddenly we looked up and, yeah, they had copied a lot of our tactics. They had taken a lot of our best people and had closed that gap and then could deploy their huge advantages around brand, around resources. Right. You know, you mentioned the doomed cable analogy and some of like that peak.

23:53And one sort of phrase that I think lives rent free, so to speak, in the head of many journalists, digital journalists is, quote, the pivot to video. And all of these, the pivot to video, we're going to do video. And my impression - Didn't we just launch a video product, Joe? Wait, are we being filmed? I'm still soaking wet. It was raining. answer we did we odd lots is in fact doing a pivot to video no it's kind of but my impression is like what happened facebook came to a bunch of publishers and said we will you'll go viral more if you do video well there's a lot who was driving this there's higher cpms and you're going to do really well and so build all these expensive video studios and you're going to make a lot of money is that basically what happened then it didn't materialize in the end yeah i find it a little hard to I mean to be mad at Facebook for this they just kind of randomly gave a bunch of publishers money and in some did redeploy their existing writers who weren't good on video to make videos I mean I you know there was there has been in society a pivot to video there's this widely used product called TikTok which is relied on short video so I mean I think the notion that news was going to be delivered in video by people who were terrible at making videos was probably not the case.

25:10And it was a sign. I think it came as a lot of these digital publishers were scrambling for revenue trying to figure out how their businesses were supposed to work. And so a pivot was a pretty scary thing. Can we talk more about the distribution channels here? Because I think that's the subtext of a lot of what we're talking about, which is you had this explosion of digital media, but then at the same time, you had a handful of distribution platforms, So things like Google, Facebook, Apple, that were growing more and more powerful and sort of more concentrated in their own monopoly power when it came to distributing the news.

25:45So how much of that was a negative force on the digital media business? Well, it was the digital media business. I mean, it was a hugely positive force, right? much of the digital media business and certainly really buzzfeed above all was a just all your chips on the table bet on facebook and subsidiarily twitter and pinterest and others and that they were going to be your distribution and that again like jonah peretti's basic theory which i think you can argue now whether it's true or not was that facebook and these other platforms would find that they had a need for quality content to retain their users to compete against places like Netflix, and that they would eventually start paying for higher and higher quality content as other platforms head through history.

26:27And that just did not happen. And that went totally wrong. Here's a 2023 question. How old is Semiphar now? About six months. Six months. Where does traffic come from today? Or where does audience, if you want to redefine that, come from in 2023? Because it doesn't feel like many things go viral at any level anymore. Yeah, it's such a totally different world. I mean, newsletters are really important to us and probably the sort of core of our distribution. The web exists and it's a very familiar space to me for someone who's been kind of looking at traffic for 20 years and that the Drudge Report is a great, is a really important, many people continue to go there.

27:06there's a set of kind of what I think of as Asian style aggregators, some Asian, some specifically out of Asia, Smart News, Newsbreak, Little Send Traffic, Flipboard indoors. But in a weird way, it's this internet from 15 years ago before social media existed that has returned. And then, you know, we do a lot of events, which people really like, which is, you know, the most intimate and direct form of audience. So is that the future of traffic and audience? Is it the sort of smaller scale, still develop it organically? Or are there still the big channels? I know you mentioned Drudge Report, but is anyone still trying to target, you know, Facebook exclusively now?

27:43You know, Facebook is just not on our radar as a distribution channel at all. I mean, it's a really, I mean, that was probably the biggest surprise to me in starting a new thing. And I'm not sure there's one future. I mean, I think what we're really looking at is a much more splintered landscape in which, among other things, like the web itself and traffic is one of the splinters. Is there like ever going to be another publication that tries to be a, you know, like the thing about Insider and the thing about BuzzFeed and the thing about Gawker through all of the various like Gawker subverticals is that they were essentially attempts to replicate or go after the New York Times and to create these all-in-one news packages, Huffington Post as well, obviously like destinations that had everything like would anyone try that again to sort of like create an all-purpose uh news brand what kind of an idiot would do something like that well actually i mean you don't have sports i mean like you know at some i i know we're i would say i would say before launch sports i would say nobody would would try it would imagine that you can do it in a kind of explosive flip the lights on and reach a billion people in three years kind of a I mean, I think, I do think that it's again, a weird changing moment where what people want is some is people are if the challenges are different.