Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (11 page)

This is now the standard model for blogs.
Forbes.com
was relaunched with hundreds of blogger contributors who are paid per visitor. Seeking Alpha, a network of financial writers (arguably worth a lot to its investor-type readers), launched a payment platform in 2010 that pays writers based on the traffic their posts generate. The average payment per article turned out to be only fifty-eight dollars for the first six months. A writer needs to rack up roughly one hundred thousand views to make even one thousand dollars—a tough fight when you’re jostling for share of voice against the thousand-plus writers who publish there each month. The blog
The Awl
announced it would also start paying its writers using a similar model two years after its founding. A dozen or so bloggers split a small pool of revenue generated by advertisements on the site. The more traffic the site does, the larger the pool. It’s the same incentive—desperately dependent on big hits—but instead of fighting each other for pageviews, they’re all in on the hustle together.
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Business Insider
, run by Henry Blodget, is barely breaking even, so they don’t have much to pay their writers. Earlier experiments with highly paid, experienced journalists failed to work. When he does pay his writers, Blodget has a fairly simple rule of thumb: Writers need to generate three times the number of pageviews required to pay for their own salary and benefits, as well as a share of the overhead, sales, hosting, and Blodget’s cut. In other words, an employee making $60,000 a year needs to produce 1.8 million pageviews a month, every month, or they’re out.
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This is no easy task.

Google and YouTube pay their video bloggers solely on how many views they get, once they have been verified as a “quality” producer. In other cases Google will green-light just one hit video from an account and allow that to be monetized. YouTube sells and serves the ads, takes a substantial cut, and passes the rest on. Most of these figures are not public, but a decent account can hope to make about one penny per view, or one dollar for every thousand.

I remember working with the very popular multiplatinum rock band Linkin Park and realizing their account, which had done over one hundred million views, would earn them barely six figures—to be split among six guys, a manager, a lawyer, and a record label. These kinds of rates force channels big and small to churn out videos constantly to make money. Every view is only a penny in their pocket.

Twitter users are straight-up mercenary. Through various ad networks you can actually pay influential accounts to tweet a message of your choosing. And by message, I mean that they will tweet
anything
.

In order to promote one of Tucker’s books I got a Twitter account with more than four hundred thousand followers to say: “FACT: People will do anything for money”—for twenty-five dollars. For a few hundred dollars more I tricked dozens of other accounts into posting humiliating promotional messages that pushed the book to a number two debut on the
New York Times
bestseller list. One blog headline summed it up well: “Tucker Max Proves You Can Pay Celebrities To Tweet Whatever You Want.”
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Other companies, such as Demand Media, Associated Content, and
examiner.com
, have revived the earlier payment model and typically pay their writers on a per post and per video basis. The figure for text tends to hover around eight dollars, and slightly more for video.

If all these numbers sound small—and they do to me—it isn’t simply because bloggers are getting shafted. It’s because what they produce isn’t worth all that much. Political analyst Nate Silver estimated that the median user-contributed article on the
Huffington Post
is worth only three dollars in revenue to the company.
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So even if they were paid fairly for their contributions, it wouldn’t be much of a paycheck. Silver looked at high-profile articles by former U.S. secretary of labor Robert Reich that did 547 comments and 27,000 pageviews and concluded that they’d be worth only about two hundred dollars—an amount for which a man like that usually wouldn’t get out of bed. Most articles from the currently unpaid contributors generate significantly less revenue than that.

RIPE FOR EXPLOITATION

All this means that if bloggers want to get rich—or even cover their rent—they’ve got to find other ways to get paid. That’s where people like me come in—with boatloads of free stuff.

One of the quickest ways to get coverage for a product online is to give it away for free to bloggers (they’ll rarely disclose their conflict of interest). At American Apparel I have two full-time employees whose job it is to research fashion bloggers—girls who post photos of their outfits each day to thousands of readers who imitate them—and send them our newest garments. I would offer an affiliate ad deal to the most popular girls that would pay them a commission each time someone bought something from our site after seeing their photos. I’m sure you’re shocked to read how often their posts featured something from American Apparel.

When I promoted movies, tours of the set or invitations to the premiere worked wonders in getting blog coverage. When I worked with bands, concert tickets, or even just an e-mail from the artist, can make most blogs star-struck enough to give you what you need. And that’s nothing compared to what Samsung did: As an advertiser on
Business Insider
, Samsung paid for a
Business Insider
staffer to go to Barcelona to cover the Mobile World Congress. Thankfully, the writer disclosed this relationship. But in that very disclosure, he cops to feeling “pretty warm and fuzzy about Samsung” as a result of the generous offer. In my line of work, it’s all about encouraging those feelings however possible.
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But this is just free swag and perks. The easiest way for bloggers to make
real
money is to transition to a job with an old media company or a tech company. They can build a name and sell it to a sucker, just like their owners and investors are trying to do. Once a blogger builds a personal brand—through scoops or controversy or major stories—they can expect a cushy job at a magazine or start-up desperate for the credibility and buzz that these attributes offer. These lagging companies can then tell shareholders, “See, we’re current!” or “We’re turning things around!”

Tony Pierce, a founding editor of
LAist
, a local blog about Los Angeles, left it to head up the digital efforts for the
Los Angeles Times
.
CNET
blogger Caroline McCarthy turned in her blogging gig for a job at Google as a trend analyst. Yahoo!, in its days as a media company, hired a whole slew of bloggers away from their website, including reporters from
Defamer
and
Movieline.com
,
The Awl
, and others. Reporter John Cook left the
Chicago Tribune
to join
Gawker
, left
Gawker
to join Yahoo!, and then left Yahoo! to return to
Gawker
, all in less than two years. A former editor of
Engadget
, Joshua Topolsky, is a regular guest on
Late Night with Jimmy Fallon
and a weekly columnist for the
Washington Post
. The founding editor of
Wonkette
, Ana Marie Cox, is the queen of the revolving door; she turned her few years as a blogging celebrity into stints editing or reporting for
Time.com
, MSNBC, Air America, and
Playboy
.

This revolving door has a peculiar influence on coverage, as is to be expected. What blogger is going to do real reporting on companies like Google, Facebook, or Twitter when there is the potential for a lucrative job down the road? They’d prefer to play it safe and build their name through any means but being a reliable journalist.

For my part, I’ve lost track of the bloggers whose names I have helped make by giving them big stories (favorable and to my liking) and watched transition into bigger gigs at magazines, newspapers, and editorships at major blogs. In fact, the other day I was driving in Los Angeles and noticed a billboard on La Cienega Boulevard with nothing but a large face on it: the face of a video blogger who I’d started giving free clothes to back when his videos did a few thousand views apiece. Now his videos do millions of views, and he has a show on HBO. If you invest early in a blogger, you can buy your influence very cheaply.

In most cases, they know what I am doing and don’t care. If blog publishers are constantly looking for an exit, then their bloggers are too. They both want money from the same big media companies. They don’t care if the scandals they write about are real or made up, or if their sources are biased or self-serving—as long as the blogger gets something out of it.

THE
REAL
CONFLICT OF INTEREST

We take it as self-evident that journalists shouldn’t be paid off by people they write about or have financial investments (like owning a stock they’re reporting on) in their field. The conflict would shape the coverage and corrupt their writing. So for a second I was pleasantly surprised to read pretty much that exact sentiment in a post by
Gawker
writer Hamilton Nolan titled “New Rules for Media Ethics.” He said it plainly: “Media people—reporter, commentator, or otherwise—shouldn’t have a financial stake in what they’re reporting on.”

But then I realized how hypocritical it
all
was, since Nolan is being paid by how many views his posts do. His financial interest isn’t in
what
he writes about but in
how
he writes. In the pay-per-pageview model, every post is a conflict of interest. It’s why I’ve never bought influence directly.
I’ve never had to
. Bloggers have a direct incentive to write bigger, to write simpler, to write more controversially or, conversely, more favorably, to write without having to do any work, to write more often than is warranted. Their paycheck depends on it. It’s no wonder they are vicious, irresponsible, inaccurate, and dishonest.

They call it a “digital sweatshop” for good reason. “Ceaseless fight for table scraps” might be another phrase for it. Or in the immortal words of Henry Kissinger: The reason the knives are so sharp online is because the pie is so small.

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TACTIC #2