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Traffic
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Traffic

Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral

Ben Smith
Penguin Press, 2023
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In 2002, an MIT Media Lab student posted a prank message on a corporate website. It spurred a wave of traffic. From that experience, he understood that technology could map and measure online interactions, enabling him to convert web content into data and monetize it. Over time, this insight led to online magazines such as Gawker, The Huffington Post, and BuzzFeed. As part of the resulting boom in data, traffic, and money, the online magazine model shifted into social media platforms, facilitating extremism and hard-line, mostly right-leaning politics. Semafor editor Ben Smith details the philosophy of today’s all-encompassing digital world and paints a lively portrait of its origins.

Summary

Technology measures and maps online traffic.

In early 2002, MIT Media Lab graduate student Jonah Peretti was looking for sneakers online instead of doing his research. He tested a website’s input box to see what it would or would not block. The word “sweatshop” got through, though customer service sent Peretti an admonishing message. When he suggested that the company send him a picture of the underage Vietnamese girl who would make his shoes, the site cut him off. Peretti sent this email exchange to his friends, who sent it to other friends, who posted it on their websites. Still other websites and blogs picked up the message, and the exchange went viral.

In response to this small internet media tsunami, Peretti did what any MIT tech nerd would do: He made charts. He created a tool to measure and track internet traffic. His software tool, Blogdex, monitored material circulating on the internet and ranked items by prevalence. This was the first time anyone turned the social impact of internet media into data.

No one was certain what to do with this data avalanche, but it fascinated Nick Denton, a refined, affluent, New York-based British socialite...

About the Author

Ben Smith, co-founder and editor-in-chief at Semafor, was the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News. 

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