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Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral
Bottom of the pile
10
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
15/100Critics
6/100Scholars
Author:
Ben Smith
Publisher:
Penguin Press
Date:
May 2, 2023
The origin story of the Age of Disinformation: the candid inside tale of two online media rivals, Jonah Peretti of HuffPost and BuzzFeed and Nick Denton of Gawker Media, whose delirious pursuit of attention at scale helped release the dark forces that would overtake the internet and American society.
What The Reviewers Say
Smith attempts to tell the entire 21st-century story of online media, and quite a bit of that story ends up in the book. Smith’s particularly good when he close-reads a particular publication in its ephemeral context.
Engrossing and suspenseful.
There is lots of delusion in this book. There is also a little bit of rivalry. But I have to be honest. I do not think there are any geniuses.
Through the stories of BuzzFeed and Gawker, Smith aims to show how the media, high on the early internet’s spirit of creative adventure and freedom, got hooked on traffic.
