Traffic review: Ben Smith chronicles the rise and fall of BuzzFeed and Gawker media group

Traffic explores a zeitgeist in the early aughts and 2010s, when legacy media publications were challenged by digital-first new media startups such as Buzzfeed and Gawker. (Photo by Katie Chan via Wikimedia Commons 4.0)

On April 20, 2023, BuzzFeed announced the shutdown of BuzzFeed News, its Pulitzer Prize-winning daily news site. A week later, Vice Media announced the closure of its Vice World News brand. Gawker, the pop internet culture site, was forced to shut down in 2016 and despite attempts to revive it later, was closed again in February 2023. One thing that ties these three digital-first publications is that their rise was possible largely due to the ascent of a social media-driven internet.

Penguin Press; 352 pages; Rs 2,164 (hard cover)

In his book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, veteran journalist Ben Smith chronicles the rise and fall of BuzzFeed and the Gawker media group. Jonah Peretti (co-founder The Huffington Post and Buzzfeed) and Nick Denton (founder of Gawker) are the protagonists of this riveting record of how news distribution was disrupted by two New York upstarts. Along the journey, we also see other characters who would transform the digital media sphere. Author Ben Smith got a ringside view of these cultural shifts as he was the founder of BuzzFeed News. He moved on to become a media columnist for The New York Times and now heads Semafor, a news website.

Traffic explores a zeitgeist in the early aughts and 2010s, when legacy media publications were challenged by digital-first new media startups such as Buzzfeed and Gawker. Starting off in New York City in the early 2000s, the book explores the media landscape from the pre- to post-social media era. It also shows how this time was a perfect setup for the culture wars that have become a norm today.

The Huffington Post, Buzzfeed and Gawker might be US-specific sites, but the way they capitalized on using social media and introduced new storytelling formats, redefined the way news distribution would work globally. The listicle, click-bait headlines, viral stories like ‘The Dress’, unending image galleries or online quizzes, a blogging aesthetic to tell stories, are all legacies of these new media startups. India too saw its share of BuzzFeed clones in the mid-2010s, with ScoopWhoop being the most renowned.

The rivalry between Peretti and Denton is illustrated by highlighting the various approaches of BuzzFeed and Gawker to garner more traffic to their sites. Traffic was the only metric back then. While BuzzFeed focused on quizzes, cute-cats, listicles and eventually hard news to appeal to one emotional side of online consumers, Gawker took a no-holds barred tabloid-y approach to appeal to the base instinct of its readers.

Traffic is a documentation of an era when virality was a key benchmark for success. The journalistic merits of the story didn’t matter. Dick pics, sex tapes and gossip-driven attacks on the Silicon Valley elites was par for the course at Gawker. Eventually one such sex-tape, featuring wrestler Hulk Hogan, would lead to its demise in 2016. The financier of that lawsuit, also seeking blood, was PayPal founder Peter Thiel whom Gawker had outed as gay in 2007.

Social media, mainly Twitter and Facebook, were the major content distributors for BuzzFeed and Gawker. Especially Facebook. Smith mentions how Peretti realized the potential of Facebook’s News Feed to improve BuzzFeed’s virality prospects. The engagement BuzzFeed listicles and quizzes were getting on Facebook didn’t escape its founder Mark Zuckerberg, who even made an offer to buy BuzzFeed. Peretti didn’t relent, and instead promised to work with the Facebook News Feed team to “shift the publishers’ mindshare from a Google/keyword worldview to a Facebook/social worldview.” Peretti also used his influence with Facebook to force a challenger, Upworthy, to shut down. This partnership continued brilliantly, till Facebook decided to change its algorithms.
The larger lesson was this: Social media platforms ended up being more prosperous from the BuzzFeed/Gawker era.

One of the fascinating aspects of the book was reading about Peretti, Andrew Breitbart (who founded the right wing website breitbart.com) and Christopher Poole (founder of 4Chan) working for The Huffington Post…at the same time. Smith deftly highlights how the rise of far-right digital media was in lockstep with the rise of liberal BuzzFeed and Gawker. This was overlooked in the mainstream social media platforms as the era of Barack Obama in the mid-2010s made it seem like social media was largely Democratic. As Obama’s second stint was coming to an end, the winds of the US internet landscape were turning right. Donald Trump became the 45th US President, helped in a large part by a massive online support base. One can sense that Smith wasn’t too pleased with the rise of right-wing challengers to BuzzFeed thanks to the dismissive descriptors he uses when talking about the people behind them. Especially when contrasted against the almost saintly portrayal of Peretti.

The chapter titled Dinosaurs offers wonderful insight into how a legacy media publisher, The New York Times, would emerge from the precipice of going bankrupt in 2009 to becoming the most successful news business globally. While the Trump era gave rise to a lot of right-wing new media startups, it also strengthened legacy publishers who embraced a digital-first attitude.

Traffic is eminently readable if you are someone who was clued into the tectonic shifts in the media landscape in the late-2000s and early-2010s. This is an era before TikTok and Instagram became major distribution platforms. If you want to make sense of the culture wars we see today, Traffic gives a good grounding. Just prepare yourself to also read through some tedious sections in the book where Smith writes as if his only audience is the US media elites.

“Those of us who work in media, politics and technology are largely concerned now with figuring out how to hold these failing institutions together or to build new ones that are resistant to the forces we helped unleash,” writes Smith as he ends Traffic.

Only time will tell if Semafor, Smith’s new media bet, would be an institution that can resist the forces BuzzFeed News couldn’t.