This is so absurd, you won’t believe what happens when you click on it
My friend recommended a story recently about this guy Emerson Spartz. You can find the link to the New Yorker article here: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/05/virologist.
Here’s the article synopsis: Emerson Spartz successfully mines content, packages and structures it optimally for viral success, and collects piles of cash from advertisers, all the while offering little acknowledgement or payment to the creators of the content he uses. Whether he believes in the value he delivers is perhaps not the point. The message is that the content doesn’t really matter. “To me, it doesn’t matter whether you’re looking at cat photos that inspire you or so-called ‘high art’ that inspires you,” he says. And, to him, it doesn’t matter whether he steals cat photos or high art. If you click on it and share it, that’s all that really matters. Let’s talk about that…
The history of internet advertising features an endless parade of smarmy characters: the SEO black hatters; the popover banner breeders; the email list peddlers; the domain collecting blackmailers; the “contextual advertising” hijackers. Few survived, as most of them got phased out or beaten down by smarter users, lawsuits, and more legitimate ways of doing business. Today we have new breeds, leeching off your social media boredom and they’re totally legit! Yes. These days, it’s about the list generators, the cat pic whores, the misleading headline mongers, the outrage baiters and worse — your social media “friends” who won’t stop beating you over the head with them. They’ve even been embraced by desperate mainstream sources like the Washington Post and show up alongside “real” news articles…and generate more interest than those articles, of course. Hey…they gotta make money somehow, and no one is reading real news.
Let’s go back in time for a bit…1999 or so. “Social Media” was not yet a real term, but it all existed. File sharing (newsgroups), asynchronous communication (forums), synchronous communication (chat), and social networks (The Well and many others) all existed in digital form. The Globe was one of the first social networks that relied on advertising for revenue. I was there. They were one of our clients. They were a publicly-traded company. If you’re under 30, I’ll bet all the beenz I ever had that you haven’t heard of them. Or Beenz.
I was working at one of the largest ad technology firms in the world at the time. Digital advertising has gotten a lot more complicated now, but it’s still a pretty straightforward business: I’ve got original content that I publish. You can advertise on it. Here’s how much it will cost you every time I deliver your ads to my readers. If you’d like to target specific readers based on some the reams of data these servers has on them, then that will cost extra. The promises and expectations have changed, but it’s basic advertising.
What made it all even simpler in those days was that there were really only a few options you had when you constructed an internet ad. You could use a banner, or you could use a slight variation on a banner (within certain accepted dimensions accepted by industry-accepted ad servers and counters). As for your options, you could deliver those ads directly on a website you thought appropriate, or you could go to an ad network that packaged websites visited by your target demographic at one agreed-upon price across them all. You send off the ad (directly to the server or…I don’t know…as an email attachment to an “Ad Trafficker”) and start writing checks for all the times people saw the ad…or supposedly saw the ad when that page loaded.
Of course, back then people were punching monkeys. Like…really punching cartoon monkeys in an ad banner. Or dutifully clicking on any damn thing with the words “Click Here!” Today, my 2-year old does that on YouTube videos and ends up subscribed to their channels, and that’s it: In substance, nothing has really changed. Of course human beings have not evolved in fifteen years. But the stakes have, and the volume has. I’ll get back to that in a moment.
Back then, of all these banners, guess which ads enjoyed the most exposure — and clicks? Well of course…the monkeys. The flashing “Click Here!” banners. One day I decided to look into our traffic logs. I noticed that, at whatever point that was, there was one particular company responsible for the largest volume of ads being delivered on their websites. By a long shot. By a ridiculous long shot. I had never heard of them. No one had. In fact, today I have no idea what the name of that company was. So I started looking deeper at the numbers. They seemed to have had dozens of sites (lots of inventory). Every one of those sites was pumping out ad banners at rates that were…epic. So, of course, I had to check out these sites. Why were people going to these sites? Why were advertisers so excited to advertise with these guys? (Actually, they weren’t, but that’s another matter).
These URLs are probably as gone as this company now, so I can’t confidently recall any of them. laffs4you.com. webfunnypix.com. humorstop.com. Shit like that. What was each of these sites about? Well the same thing, actually…stolen content that made you laugh and share. Maybe all the sites even had the exact same content: A Playboy cartoon…a pic of an awful record album cover…a shot of a boob hanging slightly out in a family picture…a woman passed out on a bench with a comment embedded in it…a beautiful and inspiring photo…and so on. I am actually recalling specific examples — I remember them vividly. I remember them vividly because I couldn’t believe it. Sure…advertisers paid very little for these ads…but the sites were making up for that with traffic volume, and the cost to each advertiser was probably minimal. It was the stuff you throw your ads at near the end of every month with your last few dollars before your next order. It was cheap and available inventory. And it was all stolen.
These sites needed to be constructed such that, with every view of your LOL content, you’d pump out a new ad. Actually, two ads: one above, and one below the “meme”. ←Not a word regular people ever used then. I think there was a rule about it having to be the same ad, yielding only one impression, but…eh. You could claim it was a technical glitch in that case. Point is, you never put your stolen content in a grid for easy viewing. Of course not. You stick right and left arrows on either side of the passed out lady or cute kitten and generate 2 more ad views and a few more pennies.
Does any of this sound familiar?
So…I did what anyone in his right mind would do…I started going through all these sites and right-clicking on all the content. I think I right-clicked. Did Netscape support that? Save…save…save…save. Then I started throwing up this stolen content — from a site of stolen content — on my site of stolen content in my free time.
Financially, nothing much came of it, truth be told, but I was growing some traffic and money, and I was using our ad servers as a legitimate client. It didn’t last long. That’s because I showed folks at work. My site was not JUST stolen stuff. I also published original content. Part of that original content included…um…work-related material. Nothing serious or incriminating (in my view)…but enough to get people in the office sharing it and for me to receive a call during a meeting in SF from my manager to fly back across the country and have a little chat with HR about it. They were fair. They were understanding. But this incident had 2 outcomes (a third was an apology to a workmate…another story):
- I had to remove the ads from my sites.
- A new company policy was instituted: No employees could also be customers.
Think about that. Imagine being an employee at Ford Motor Company and being forced to drive a Toyota to work. But I digress.
Let me return to the point that since those days, people have not changed, and neither has the game. What has changed is that some folks, according to the New Yorker article (ok — an investor of the Spartz enterprise), think of Spartz as a “Steve Jobs”. That’s sad, and I am quite certain that the writer is mocking here, and purposely filled the article with these most egregious sentiments for a guy whose contribution to society is pumping out stuff like 16 Ridiculous But True Facts That Will Make People Think You’re A Liar and These 18 Disney Characters In Halloween Costumes Are The Best Things You’ll See Today.
People are going to click on Viral Nova headlines. I get it. We all need our LOLcats or lists of People Just Like Us to get through the day. But in the real world, we like to think that the people who created that stuff that went into those lists would get compensated, since lots of money (and our personal data) is somehow moving around. Instead, we live in a world where the people who stole that stuff and repackaged it get compensated. Handsomely. The people who built the properties where those things get propagated get compensated. It’s actually what gives them value. And maybe this is ok. Maybe what we really want is speed and pretty packaging. After all, how would you have ever SEEN grumpy cat in the first place? The medium is the message. The middle man who it knows how to wrap it up and get it in front of us immediately and with an enticing headline deserves some credit here. He’s really good at it because he understands that we are all really children who want to grab at free candy put in front of us, and will. We’re just sitting around dying for it. The thing is, he didn’t just pick up and repackage free trash. He picked up and repackaged someone else’s time and work.
By the way, here is a snippet about ViralNova from Business Insider, a publisher that really understands these things: “Last month, his website pulled in 100 million visitors. DeLong uses remnant ads (cheap ads, like Google AdSense). There are two ads on every page.”
There are two ads on every page.
Maybe most content creators really are happy about all of this. It’s “free exposure”. A couple months ago I was at a meeting with product technologists who connect advertisers to bloggers to provide content to shill whatever it is they are selling. When I asked about usage costs and copyright, I was told that compensation was simply not an issue for 99% of bloggers and content creators, so advertisers usually don’t even bother asking for permission any more. They just paste/publish/share, and so on. The creators (we’re told) are overjoyed for the exposure. I don’t believe it, and if it is true, then content creators — photographers, musicians, artists, writers — are only hurting themselves buying into that. Besides, on the Spartz sites (and others) if there is any attribution at all, it comes in the form of tiny text at the bottom that says “h/t to __________”. Hat tip. That’s what the creators and journalists get. Not real names, but the name of the site, in tiny letters, that initially published some or all of this stuff. Sure, we share stuff we like. But should marketers? Should they share your stuff to sell shit? Hey, it’s a free world. Whore yourself out for free, I guess.
According to an excellent documentary, Generation Like, teenagers don’t even comprehend the term “selling out”, which means they don’t comprehend that work and creative output has a monetary value that they should demand. After all, they probably are better marketers than the brand managers and ad agency decision-makers who, no matter what they do, won’t ever understand them. Not only are they providing content, they are actually providing better social media strategy than most ad agency monkeys.
Someone is going to have to create content and by god we’ll be in a world of lists about what fucking disney princess is most like you when they do. And it won’t be journalists writing these. Maybe out-of-work, scraping-by, bleary-eyed, alcoholic, self-loathing journalists writing for a hotel chain sponsoring a list on Buzzfeed of places “you have never been to, but are totally awesome” and who just happened to have built new hotels in those exact cities. That important acknowledgement can be found in the same little text as the h/t text: brought to you by Marriott. Yes…you never knew just how awesome Akron was, did you?
This exact thing is already happening plenty. I have also seen certain virally-successful site authors credit “Google Images” for photos they publish that some photographer spent time and effort to take. Google Images didn’t take that photo and you know it! Christ. I think these publishers are getting better about this. They have to as they become more successful. After all, their entire strategy is to get a hold of your attention any way they can, get an insane valuation on it, THEN figure out how to be legitimate. Why not?
https://gigaom.com/2013/06/18/photographer-sues-buzzfeed-for-3-6m-over-viral-sharing-model/
Let’s get back to that client I was talking about from way back at the turn of the millennium. None of the tools Spartz uses were really available to just anyone. There were no sophisticated user data-gathering techniques. Easy A-B tests (thats when you test one headline or image or whatever against others to see which gets more clicks) were not so readily available to a young entrepreneur, though one could do it manually. Tools to understand sharing behavior were almost nonexistent — you’d have to look through reams of web logs…and they had to be connected for you to figure out how people got from one place to another (the ad servers were in the unique position to do this). There were no blogs. Without the speed and connectivity of social media, there was no way to amplify this effect to the levels of reach we see today. You had to somehow draw someone to your site of stolen content and ad banners and lists and right/left arrows of celebrities without makeup some other way. And today? I actually read a comment on one of these listicles just last week chastising the “editor” for making her click from item to item. “I love your lists but why do you make us click to see each one instead of putting the whole list on one page?!” Heh.
So perhaps some things have changed. But people have not. And apparently advertisers have not, nor have digital advertising methods, nor sleazy business models. When you are looking at these sites, you are looking at some long-forgotten sleaze of digital yesteryear, rearing its ugly head with prettier pictures and millions in backing. Those earlier forebears are gone, as they should be. An ugly stain. Emerson Spartz? A genius. Buzzfeed? $85oM valuation. How did that happen?
Here’s the thing we’ve learned since 1999. It is perfectly OK in this business to steal or use stuff to generate an audience. Once you have an audience, investors flock. Once they flock, they start pushing you to create real value and stop stealing shit. Once you have money, you can hire the right people in the content world. Hell, I actually clicked on a great Buzzfeed article recently, written by someone who seemed to be a great writer, employed by Buzzfeed. They do fund real journalism with this separate thing they properly call “entertainment”. YouTube went through this growth trajectory by building an audience around copyrighted, stolen content. But then, they could rightfully claim that they did not themselves publish that content. And eventually they had to comply with the law and come up with a legitimate business model around it. They have. Today, there is so much content, with such little respect for ownership, that you can get away with a hell of a lot while you build your audience. By the time the money comes, it’s full steam ahead — with actually creating content…value. Then legitimacy, depending on how you want to define that word. It’s a pretty vague one here in the wonderful world of digital advertising.
Here’s where things could get better. I think eventually we will find better ways of gauging value. Content producers need to ignore the vanity metrics, or at least not lean on them so much (likes, shares, views, etc.) We’ve got to stop using popularity as a gauge for quality. One “like” from the right person is just worth more than 1000 likes from a bot or a Like Farm.
Just as back in the early part of the 2000's we learned that clicks on monkeys weren’t much, so we will learn that sharing absolute crap shouldn’t be worth much either.
