By Ryan Holiday
Trading up the chain – place a story with a small blog that has very low standards, which then becomes a source for a story by a larger blog and create a “self-reinforcing news wave”. 18
89% of journalists reported using blogs for their research or stories. Half reported using Twitter and 2/3rds reported using Facebook or other social media. 20
The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, CBS all have sister sites like SmartMoney.com, Mainstreet.com, BNet.com etc that feature the company logos but have their own editorial styles. 21
Katie Couric claims she gets many story ideas from her Twitter followers, which means that getting a few tweets out of the seven hundred or so people she follows is all it takes to get a shot at nightly national news. 23
“Media companies can very much be in a race against time for growth. Investors want a return on their money and given the economics of web news that almost always requires exponential growth in uniques and pageviews.” – Ryan McCarthy, Reuters. 31
Traffic is money. Blogs make their money from selling advertisements. An ad buyer buys space on a news website based on impressions on the site. A few blogs produce a portion of their revenue through selling extras such as conferences or affiliate deals, but for the most part, this is the business: Traffic is money. 32
An article that provides worthwhile advice is no more valuable than one instantly forgotten. So long as the page loads and the ads are seen, both sides are fulfilling their purpose. A click is a click. 33
Blogs are built to be sold. They make money thru advertising but the real money is in selling it to a larger company. 36
Online journalism is fast paced. Blog pieces much come out in hours not days. Professional blogging is done in a boiler room and it is brutal. 42
Seeking Alpha pays writers based on traffic. The average payment per article turned out to be 58 dollars for the first six months per article. 43
The easiest way for bloggers to make real money is to transition to a job with an old media company or tech company. Once a blogger builds a personal brand, they can land a cushy job at a magazine or start up. 45
Henry Kissinger: “The real reason knives are so sharp online is because the pie is so small.” 47
Press releases are a good way to quickly get your news spread online to bloggers. A lot of sites like Google Finance, CNN Money, Yahoo! Finance and Motley Fool all automatically syndicate the major release wires. 52
Sometime bloggers are under such pressure and the story they are chasing is so crazy that they don’t want to risk doing research, because the whole façade would collapse. 53
Top stories all have a pattern that polarize people. Behavior, belief, or belongings. – Tim Ferriss 59
“the most powerful predictor of virality is how much anger an article evokes.” Anger spreads. 63
Sadness is the opposite and does not spread viraly. 63
“What’s infamy matter if you can keep your fortune?” Juvenal
The real reason RSS subscription based economy was abandoned was that in this economy the users are in control. Have followers instead of subscribers, where readers have to check back on sites often and are barraged with a stream of refreshing content laden with ads is much better for their bottom line. RSS buttons disappeared so users can be deceived more easily. 85
People respond to and are deceived by the same things they were a hundred years ago. Headlines and copy has not changed. 90
The best way to get bloggers engaged is to come up with the idea and let them think they were the ones that came up with it. Write the headline or hint at the options in your email or press release and let them steal it. 93
A status update that is met with no likes is like a joke met with silence. It must be rethought and rewritten and we don’t show our true selves online, but a mask designed to conform to the opinions around us. Neil Strauss 95
There are services that let you buy traffic by sending thousands of visitors to a specific page. StumbleUpon and Outbrain. 99
If you post something but nobody responds it means one of few things:
- The post is correct, well written and needs no more follow up
- The post is complete and utter nonsense
- No one read the post for whatever reason
- No one understood the post but won’t as for clarification
- No one cares about the post for whatever reason
You can provide fake comments to your articles about you or your company from a blocked IP address – good and bad to make it clear there is a hot debate. Fake emails to reporters, positive and negative. 101-102
800 words is the limit. Unless readers can see the end of your post they are going to stop reading because scrolling is a pain, feels like an article will never end. A smart blogger breaks it up with graphics or photos. 108
Since bloggers must find an angle, they always do and since you know this it is easy to leave crumbs. 115
“The controversy machine is bigger than the reality machine.” 119
Iterative journalism (process/beta journalism) – reporting/publishing first and then verifying what they wrote AFTER they’ve posted it. 166
You can tell if you look at a user and it is one of their first blog posts, it is likely a fake. Also the time it was posted would not be 4am. 169
Once the mind has accepted a plausible explanation for something, it becomes a framework for all the information that is perceived after it. We’re drawn subconsciously, to fit and contort all the subsequent knowledge we receive into our framework whether it fits or not. Psychologists call this cognitive rigidity. 184
We place an inordinate amount of trust in things that have been written down. This comes from centuries of knowing that writing was expensive – that it was safe to assume that someone would rarely waste the resources to commit to paper something untrue. The written word and use of it conjures up deep associations with authority and credence that are thousands of years old. 185
Humor is an incredibly effective vehicle for getting pageviews and spreading narratives. The easiest story for blogs to write are the ones in which they made snarky fun of the entire mess. 196
Snark – a remark or comment that doesn’t mean anything but it still hurts. 197
Jujitsu – the energy you’d exert in your defense will be used against you to make the embarrassment worse. 197
Snark makes the speaker feel a strength they know deep down they do not possess. It shields insecurity and makes the writer feel like they are in control. Snark is the ideal intellectual position. It can criticize but cannot be criticized. 202
When you see “we’re hearing reports” know that reports could mean anything random from Twitter to message boards or worse. 224
“Leaked” means leaked by someone via email to a blogger. 224
“Breaking” or “developing” story means what you’re reading reached you too soon and it was published before verified. 224
“Updated” means that no one actually bothered to rework the story in light of the new facts. 224
HARO – these people try to find some, any, stamp of approval or signal of credibility. Blogs have a few minutes to write their posts, few resources, and little support so they desperately need something that says “this is not like those other things” even though it is. So they make up differentiators and misuse old ones. 227
HARO is perhaps the clearest and most embarrassing example of corruption and laziness in online media. 240
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair. 243