Cackling at the Death of Clickbait
What the algorithm giveth, the algorithm taketh away.
While doom and gloom is the usual offering here at this publication — you guys know what you’re getting into when our lead feature is called “The Axis of Genocide” — there are still good news and positive developments I feel compelled to report. In some ways the world certainly is improving. And here’s one of them.
Today, let’s consider a seriously encouraging turn in the online media world. This is something that most people probably haven’t noticed very much yet, but for those of us who have made our careers in this strange “new media” professional space, it’s been something that’s been easy to see ramp up in recent years.
And I absolutely love it.
I am watching one of my greatest enemies wither and die.
This is a great media-oriented Substack that I really enjoy following, which I should have included on last Saturday’s top 20 Substacks of 2024:
Here’s an excerpt that summarizes what’s starting to happen. He’s talking about how, for the last 15 years, a common job of young writers and journalists has been to take some video or bit of information and repackage it with the hope of it going “viral” and bringing in a ton of web traffic, my emphasis added:
By writing his John Oliver Video Sweepstakes column, Herrman was documenting the silliness of the era, but now, with the benefit of a decade’s worth of hindsight, it all seems especially absurd. How could we not realize back then that these armies of 20-somethings were producing no additive value? And why did it not occur to us that Facebook could turn off the traffic spigot just as easily as it had flipped it on?
Regardless of the media’s past mistakes, it’s clear that the industry needs to adapt to the post-scale reality it now finds itself in. Meta and nearly every other major tech platform are sending less and less traffic to publishers, and programmatic adtech has demonstrated a consistent ineptitude at generating meaningful revenue for high-quality outlets.
We’ve entered the less-is-more era of media in which publishers must decrease their content output, de-prioritize driveby traffic, and focus instead on better monetizing their core audiences. This means less reliance on programmatic advertising and more emphasis on direct-sold ads, subscriptions, and live events.
And here’s a great recent story in The Wall Street Journal on this theme that everyone in any way involved in the media business should read:
Note this part here, my emphasis added:
The kind of advertising revenue that the publication generates—which accounts for the other third of its overall revenue—has also drastically changed in recent years. A larger portion of it comes from direct relationships with brands and a growing events business, instead of the more-volatile programmatic advertising that relies heavily on traffic from search-engine and social-media platforms.
Goldberg said the Atlantic was once in the traffic-chasing business, following a playbook set by BuzzFeed and Vice, two publishers that have since fallen on hard times as the programmatic-ad spigot dried up. At one point, the Atlantic had a handful of breaking news and business reporters, Goldberg said.
“That worked until it didn’t,” Goldberg said of that strategy.
The publication shifted its focus to recruiting high-profile writers, including former New York Times staffers Michael Powell, Jennifer Senior and Caitlin Dickerson. Dickerson won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism for a 2022 story about children separated from parents at the southern border, and Senior won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for a cover story on the family of a victim of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
As we used to say in the good-ole-blogging days - after dropping a few paragraphs of excerpt so we didn’t have to do the work of rewriting the ideas ourselves - “read the whole thing.”
The story here between the two pieces is pretty simple: the whole business of publishing media online is now having to fundamentally change because the old method of trying to “maximize traffic” through provoking as many clicks as possible does not work anymore. The social media sites which enabled it have changed their algorithms to no longer reward the kind of low-quality, high-emotional-manipulation “clickbait” that it did for the last 15 years. And so too with search engines.
I saw this coming a decade ago. I saw the house of straw that so many publications had chosen, that so many writers chose for their career. I knew of the big bad wolves that could emerge from the woods at any time to blow over fundamentally bad, immoral business models.
And so, as this long-time hated nemesis of mine, “clickbait,” now continues its gradual, prolonged death, let’s explain how we got here, and why I take such pleasure at watching this enemy’s defeat.
It makes me feel like such a fuckin’ old man to try and recall back just 20 years ago, to remember what the internet and this new emerging media known as the “blogosphere” were like during the early ‘00s, as my high school years concluded and college began.
I remember the first blog I ever saw. I was probably a freshman or sophomore at the time, around about 2003. My editor at the college newspaper, a graduate student I regarded as much cooler than I was, showed me “the Rude Pundit.” Here was some unknown troublemaker sounding off on politics, using expletives galore and one disgusting, X-rated descriptor after another. As a writer he was able to speak honestly: there was no gatekeeper between him and his readers. He didn’t have to get a letter to the editor or opinion column approved. He didn’t have to conform to the acceptable bounds of political discourse. He could just let it fly, unconcerned with whether he might offend anyone. And, of course, if he did, then what consequences could there be? He was not reliant on advertisers who might be scared off by his scary words. He wasn’t writing under his real name. He was “the Rude Pundit.” All the more reason to not be afraid to be truthful about what he thought.
As I started writing more for the school newspaper, the Iraq war began, and I started shifting from cultural criticism to political polemics. It was time to bang the drum in opposition to a war I saw as my generation’s Vietnam, and doing that meant finding strong arguments and bulletproof facts. And where were they in abundance? In “the blogosphere” - a loosely connected, gradually-growing group of writers and publications from across the political spectrum using the new technology of web-log publishing software to start to challenge media conventions of the period.
By 2004, both the election and the war were in full swing. Now a political science major supplementing my English major, I started my own blogs. I began learning the style of the medium and the various writers developing it. And it was a lot of fun. Blogging allowed so much more flexibility and freedom compared to writing an article or an essay. A blog post could be just one sentence with a link somewhere. Or it could be a giant 5,000-word monster essay. It could be a careful analysis of a controversial current event. Or it could be some cute animal pictures and personal reflections - or even some weird blending of both.
And however many F-bombs you wanted to drop was fine. This was the era of “South Park,” Eminem, and Tarantino.
Another aspect of this early blogosphere era was the degree to which “Left” and “Right” engaged with one another, dialoguing, debating, and sometimes even developing friendships. As I went out to find arguments to support my college leftism, so too did I seek to understand the right-wingers and their ideas. After all, being liberal meant being open-minded to new ideas and tolerant of others’ perspectives. So therefore, was it not incumbent upon me to consider what conservatives believed and why they believed it? My discovery of Robert Anton Wilson’s “model agnosticism” philosophy around this time further accelerated this tendency of trying to understand worldviews very different than my own.
And where did this open-mindedness lead? From a gradual shifting of my perspective from “Left” to “Right,” culminating in 2009 starting my first full-time editorial position, editing a media criticism blog for a conservative non-profit after a year and a half of writing freelance contributions for them.
So in less than five years from starting blogging as a fun hobby, I began getting paid per piece for it. Then, a year later, someone wanted to have me do it all day long. And not just writing posts, but growing, managing, and editing a whole team of bloggers.
And that was then my life all day for six years, from 2009-2015. All blogging, all the time. First for a conservative nonprofit, then a conservative for-profit, with little changing between the two except for the range of subjects that I could write about and the level of professionalism exhibited by my bosses.
But several things changed during those years - several things that would depart wildly from that 2000-2008 early blogging ethos that had drawn me into this world.
And the changes would be so total and profound that I would need to escape.
So what was the point of blogging? One could technically blog about anything — this publishing software was just a neutral tool one could use as one wanted. But what took traction broadly culturally in “blogging” was political blogging. Commonly understood, “blogging” is largely synonymous with “blogging about politics.”
From the beginning the potential of blogging was clear: this was a tool for people to use to speak more truthfully about important truths. Simple. Blogging was a tool of activism. Simple. Just as previous generations used newspapers, magazines, and radio to grow movements for pushing major societal changes, now we could use blogs - and “new media” more broadly - to do the same. Oh, and we could move a whole lot faster than newspapers and magazines.
So when I began at this full-time in 2009, that’s how I clearly understood myself. I was a conservative activist blogger, a conservative new-media activist, a conservative new-media journalist, or, the formulation I still prefer - a new-media troublemaker. I soon become a counter-Islamist activist and a Zionist activist too. So-called “war blogging” had become a central current in conservative blogging circles ever since 9/11. I aligned with it then; with the “Axis of Genocide” series and my psychedelic Zionist approach I still align with it today.
Blogging was a means to a pretty straightforward end: fighting political bad guys. What information could we find, what arguments could we make, what creativity could we employ in order to make an impact in the real world ideological fights raging across America? What could we do to persuade others to embrace our ideas and oppose our enemies? Which terrible politicians could be brought down through investigative journalism? That was what mattered.
Or at least, that’s what I thought mattered.
However, soon Google dropped a new piece of technology into the river, like throwing a cow to a school of piranhas. Google Analytics changed everything in blogging. Now - for free - bloggers could find out two game-changing facts:
How many views and individual visitors did each blog post receive?
What were the sources that brought these readers to your blog?
Suddenly that data began coming to my fingertips all day, throughout the day. So as I assigned topics to writers, I could then calibrate them according to which subjects got the most traffic, which formulations of headlines got the most traffic, which writers got the most traffic - and then, ultimately, which combinations of those elements would attract traffic from which other websites.
Securing my job — at least I thought! — was dependent on accomplishing one primary task: growing the blog into what my boss called “a powerhouse blog.” Meaning, on the list ranking the various conservative blogs and news sources, he wanted ours to be competitive with those by his rival media activist figures who he believed himself equivalent or even superior to to at a professional level.
So my incentives were not there anymore to use the blog in clever activist ways, pursuing real-world change. Instead, the goal became to show that I could make numbers rise on a chart from month to month. Could I show that the blog was “growing,” in that it is getting an increasing number of page views, and rising in the traffic rankings compared to other sites?
So I figured out how to do that. It wasn’t very hard: plenty of other people with much more investor capital than I figured it out, too. Publish a dozen blog posts a day on a variety of subjects, and eventually you’ll get enough data in which the patterns emerge. Then it will become clear how to make any of them go up or down.
I’ll give one example - the key one - that I learned for how to maximize web traffic during this 2009-2015 period. Two magic words that put food on the table for my family and paid my rent for years: list posts.
It didn’t take much time looking at traffic data to understand that posts with a number in the headline - posts that announced some sort of list ranking different items - drew way more attention than any other format. The Buzzfeed “listicle” became the style of choice for many years. I assigned and wrote so many “list posts” on so many endless topics. When I shifted over to Pajamas Media - soon rechristened PJ Media supposedly to try and be taken more seriously - in 2011 and took over the PJ Lifestyle blog, then lists didn’t have to just focus on politics. They could be basically anything. These would consistently get the most traffic every month. That I would lay them out over multiple pages certainly helped, of course.
And that’s when I learned something else, too, as my access to traffic data now expanded at a much bigger site: content about stuff other than politics would generate way more traffic than political topics. The “lifestyle” lists that I assigned and edited were always the top pieces, far more attention-grabbing than the thoughtful, erudite Middle East analyses of my colleague and mentor who transformed my understanding of the Middle East, the late Barry Rubin.
There was much more traffic to be grabbed through fun, light emotional pieces, rather than through serious political analysis or activism.
Now, as I was putting in all that time editing goofy lists, I would rationalize it — that I was offering the “spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down.” That this fun, light content would draw people in to find the more serious political stuff that was really what these sites were supposed to be all about. Just as it was normal for a newspaper to have a comics page or for a magazine like National Review to have movie reviews, for a political news site to have a culture section seemed no different.
However, you know what else was normal? For an angel investor to try to make some fucking money off of a website he’s foolishly pumped millions of dollars into every year.
For the first years that I worked at PJ, it was run by the CEO and CFO, with Barry overseeing the Middle East coverage. But by 2015, Barry had died, both the CEO and CFO had stepped down, and now the “Zany Billionaire” had to step in and figure out what to do with this money pit of a website, appointing a new CEO who knew nothing about either the media business or the political world.
(One of the producers on PJ’s TV end once told me the Zany Billionaire was one of those high-energy entrepreneurial guys who got 10 ideas a day — seven were terrible, two were OK, and one was brilliant. And of course, he could never tell the difference - but he had plenty of money to waste to try and find out since one hit could more than pay for all the failures.) For years he had focused all his attention just on the internet video side, leaving us on the writing end to largely run hog wild. I got away with so much strange, esoteric, provocative shit. As long as the traffic kept flowing they didn’t really care too much about how I did it as long as it didn’t get too sexy - the Zany Billionaire apparently didn’t like that stuff for whatever reasons so photos of women in bikinis as a way to inflate “traffic” even more were not an option.
Apparently knowing that I was the one who had been analyzing PJ’s traffic patterns for years, so I could know what to assign, the “ZB” gave me my own bizarre assignment. He had somehow acquired the traffic data from one of our hot new competitors. They had recently come out of nowhere, immediately killing it in the traffic rankings. I won’t name the site. It was fucking terrible, as I’d soon discover, and never accomplished anything of consequence or published any memorable writers.
So here I was with years of spreadsheets listing tens of thousands of this other conservative website’s posts and how many views each one received. I felt like a lion preparing to dine on a fresh gazelle. And while it was a tasty meal, and I quite enjoyed the challenge of trying to figure out why this new site had grown so popular so fast, soon the results I discovered left me sick.
It was so simple: I just had to sort the articles, ranking them from highest to lowest traffic, and then identify the common traits among the top articles. And it was immediately clear what they were doing.
Two words:
Emotional Manipulation
All of the top stories played to simple, core emotions: Here’s a post that is going to make you feel angry. Here’s a post that is going to play to your sense of patriotism. Here’s a post that’s going to tease you with something sexy. Here’s something SHOCKING! In each post, the headline was specifically formulated to tease the reader, play with their emotions, and then only relieve the sense of unknown if they click.
Thus, it was in this period when “clickbait” was born: articles which use a headline and an image to tease and emotionally manipulate the viewer to click, only to be almost always disappointed by what they the find.
Further: Facebook was the primary accelerant to all this. These emotionally-manipulative headlines played very well on that site in particular, I suspect because that was the period when boomers were starting to become prominent users of the platform. And this competitor site had grown numerous Facebook groups where it could pump out its content and some of it could “go viral.”
The tools and techniques which I’d used for years - to draw people to read conservative political ideas and pursue right-wing activism - could be repurposed and pumped up on steroids to get people to click and to read something trivial just long enough to look at ads.
And selling ads was, of course, the way these sites made money, which was now their only purpose having become fully corporatized.
Soon, that was the direction that the Zany Billionaire Big Man wanted to go. He saw that the conservative site with the most traffic was nothing but clickbait, so he chose to entirely shift the site to follow that model, too. Now the goal was to try and find different pieces of media around the web and see if we could repackage them so they could “go viral.” Sometimes I was even asked to post some odd video that had already gone “viral,” but that my bosses thought we could get some traffic from, too — the same thing as what the top article referred to as the “John Oliver Video Sweepstakes,” wherein many people all share the same video or piece of media in hopes that it will be their posting that generates a bunch of “viral traffic.” One time it was something as mundane as video of a sinkhole swallowing up a bunch of cars on a road. Yeah, we’d come a long way in just a few years.
It was very apparent to me at the time how fucking stupid all of this was. We were remaking a whole site that had built a brand over nearly a decade as an aspiring California conservative new media equivalent of National Review in order to play to what’s popular on Facebook right now?
As smart as the Zany Billionaire was, how could he have not understood the basics of algorithms for social media and search engines? How could he have not realized that the companies responsible for “sending us traffic” can and do tweak their algorithms all the time, and thus something that works great for years will all of a sudden produce nothing?
And that’s what did happen. Circa 2017-2018 there was a change in algorithms which did start punishing overtly clickbait sites. Many sites built entirely in this style went out of business. Thankfully PJ - which had never been profitable - still had its angel investor to burn his money on the company altar, so it didn’t matter. At least, not until he got tired of it all and sold the company to Salem Media for an embarrassingly low figure - much less than I’d even been paid in salary over the years. Salem then fired almost the entire editorial staff and slashed the rate freelancers were paid, tying their compensation to the traffic their articles generated. The best writers soon left. The sad hacks happy to churn out clickbait endlessly — and down with their new fundamentalist Christian owners — remained.
And what is PJ Media today? Just a factory pumping out clickbait, producing nothing of value or quality, widely ignored and irrelevant, when it had the potential to reach up to where Washington Examiner or Newsmax of Daily Wire are today. A site that used to be in the top 10 of conservative blogs for years now sits here (as of Sept. 2023) at the bottom of the barrel in spite of being owned by one of the biggest Christian nationalist media companies in the country:
Just pathetic.
But it didn’t have to be this way. And it isn’t this way anymore for those who want to succeed. There are other paths and we have chosen one for God of the Desert Books.
It is the path I returned to when leaving PJ in 2015 and that still remain on to this day:
Pursue quality over quantity.
Build a dedicated, enthusiastic core audience willing to pay significantly for a variety of media products, rather than a massive readership where most could care less about the site and the content, paying no more than a few ad impressions to look at just one type of vapid content for likely less than 30 seconds.
From 2015 onward while I still wrote blog posts at various venues, I no longer had to worry anymore about “generating traffic.” Instead I sought to generate quality, first by acquiring and editing novels starting 2015 - an activity that persists to this day and will for many years to come. And second, by doing serious, investigative research, writing, and editing for Zionist nonprofit groups - also activities that persist to this day and will for many years to come.
And so this approach that I’ve personally preferred and engaged in since 2015, has now come into alignment with the shifting business models of online media.
So that’s what you can expect from GOTD.
We aren’t concerned with trying to reach as many readers as possible. We’re concerned with trying to give the devoted readers who value us a variety of high-quality products in the forms of books, subscription podcasts, and merchandise. We want to provide our fans with things that will make them excited and enthusiastic, not annoyed by gross ads or irritating “sponsorships.”
(An aside I can’t resist… At the first blog I edited, the organization’s co-founder Peter Collier - who is now dead - once told me that the only reason he went to the site was for the “Bad T-shirt” ads featuring a busty woman. I perpetually petitioned to get this ad removed - our female contributors and readers regularly complained about it - but was regularly shot down. Why a 501c3 nonprofit organization raking in millions in donations a year needed to put sexist ads on their conservative political blog is a question you’re probably smart enough to figure out for yourself. Making even further sense now why I’m so thrilled to see nasty-ad-based blogging dying?)
We have a lot of exciting new offerings coming down the pipeline that we’ll announce very soon — new books that we’re submitting to our distributor this month, new Substacks that we’re debuting to feature these books’ authors, and a new premium podcast by me. And we’ll probably have plenty of weirdness too that we haven’t thought of yet. Mike Kilgore, Sally Shideler, and our team of writers are just fountains of creativity.
Thank you everyone for your continued support and encouragement to GOTD and its writers. I hope you all enjoy the coming renaissance in online media as much as I will.
Great piece. Nicely done. Kudos.
This was a great, interesting and thorough piece! Great title and subtitle too, it made me laugh! Looking forward to the new content coming out!