Mediaboss Marketing

The social media networking site Facebook recently rejiggered the algorithm it uses to determine what its users see highlighted on their news feeds, the center column of shared links, pictures and posts that determines most of what a user sees at the site.

There is a decent chance that this change will in large part determine what you read on the Internet in 2014. Maybe not you, the regular Salon reader or relative of the author, but you the person who clicked on this story because someone you know shared it on Facebook or Twitter. The purpose of the Facebook change was to encourage the sharing of more high-quality news content that is, to make sure you are more likely to see it when high-quality news content is shared, because Facebooks news feed algorithms do as much hiding as highlighting and the result seems to have been an immediate decline in the traffic of all the sites that spent 2013 mastering the art of blowing up on Facebook. (Well, all of them but one, but well get to that.)

There is an entire ecosystem of these sites one industry publication uses the term viral publishers, which works as well as anything else and if you use Facebook regularly you probably clicked on a link from one of them at some point in 2013. Elite Daily, Distractify, ViralNova and the grandaddy of them all, Upworthy, the site that essentially invented and perfected the form in the space of a year. Upworthys headlines may be mockable (I Thought I Knew How to Goad Readers Into Clicking on Something Stupid, but What I Learned Next Changed Everything), but they definitely seemed to work.

Among the few sites with more Facebook likes than Upworthy are the Huffington Post (at this point practically old media, by Web standards) and BuzzFeed, the site that made fogies mourn for the future of news before newer, shockingly dumber sites showed up to make BuzzFeed look respectable and sophisticated by comparison.

BuzzFeed and these viral publishers depend, for their very existence, on Facebook. They talk about social media and sharing generally, but specifically it is as much about gaming Facebook as SEO was about gaming Google.

SEO is search engine optimization, a now-pass form of traffic goosing, involving a lot of unsexy coding tricks and liberal use of keywords and link spam to win high placement in Google results. These tricks once made various hucksters rich and helped establish the Huffington Post as one of the biggest sites on the Internet. SEO is being supplanted by a new series of tricks designed to manipulate social media. The social sites can claim, with some justification, to be packaging content that real people wanted to share, instead of gaming some algorithms. But just because the new techniques involve a dab of psychological manipulation doesnt mean the formula for success isnt just as rote: an arresting image or video still, and a headline that either stokes curiosity without satisfying it, or that promises some fresh, invigorating outrage.

If the stuff below the headline doesnt live up to it, no matter. One of the open secrets of the Internet is that no one reads anything on the Internet. People do go around clicking on all sorts of things, but the majority of people who clicked on this piece stopped reading it a few paragraphs ago.

One slightly terrifying fact (for an employee of an online media organization) about the rise of the viral publishers last year was how each new one was less labor-intensive than the last. Each step on the path from BuzzFeed to Upworthy to ViralNova involved fewer paid humans putting less thought into each iteration of the viral-manipulation industry. Say what you will about BuzzFeed (and I have), but at least they make things. A lot of people work there, creating original stories and videos and other pieces of information and entertainment and journalism known collectively and depressingly as content. Upworthy makes headlines literally dozens of them for each tiny story and then embeds or links to images and videos created by others. They repackage existing content. Obviously, so does BuzzFeed. And so do Salon, and Slate, and the Entire Internet. But Upworthy realized that all it had to do was repackage existing content, and not bother to create any of its own. And then Upworthy spent 2013 kicking everyones elses ass.

ViralNova seemed the logical, terrible endpoint of the entire thing. It is powered purely by cynicism and contempt. The whole site is (was?) literally one guy who realized he could pretty much do exactly what Upworthy was doing, except by himself and without any earnest illusions about making the world a better place. The founder of ViralNova discovered that it didnt even matter if the content was recently created, or from a reliable source, or true, or even plausible. All that mattered was a headline and an image, and the shares would follow. In December 2013, the site had 66 million unique visitors. (That, for the record, is a lot.) The sites creator hopes to unload it for seven figures, in part because he recognizes that Facebook could cripple its traffic in an instant if it decided to.

Facebook seems to have decided to. Facebook may have slayed this entire little industry with one blow:

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Wow. Facebook just did something amazing to crummy meme sites. And what they do next might shock everyone