Bored Couples in Restaurants

Welcome to the exciting conclusion of how I (sort of) cured myself of chasing traffic and checking metrics. When we last left off, I was discussing the wonderful ethnographic work that Caitlin Petre did for her book All The News That’s Fit to Click. Petre placed herself inside Gawker, Chartbeat, and The New York Times to see how metrics were transforming the work of editors, writers, and bloggers. Once the counting began, editors responded by favoring topics that were likely to send the Chartbeat needle soaring. In the college-educated precincts were I worked, my reaction was to assign perhaps one too many stories about Starbucks and David Foster Wallace. (That was the currency of the time.) You can see the vestiges of this attitude today in all the things you read about Taylor Swift and Sally Rooney and The Bear.

Petre describes the “folk theories” that the Gawker staff came up with to explain why a story flops—“the internet just wasn’t in the mood for this today”—or why a story succeeds: “Sometimes you just gotta let it go . . . sometimes shit hits and you have no idea why.” That last quote is particularly good. One year that I worked at Slate, the most read story—by a significant margin—was a slideshow of bored couples. (I’ll admit that it has an entrancing, clickable quality.) The folk theories helped quell the anxiety about being judged by the numbers. Another great day at Slate—haha—was when someone figured out how to rank all the writers by traffic.

Everyone was chasing better numbers because more visitors, more “uniques” could mean more ad revenue. I remember a time when BuzzFeed was in ascendance and we were given a tool designed by them that could supposedly measure the potential virality of a story within the first seven minutes of publication. This was the climate. The writing and editing were still important, but there was a new, corrupting presence in the document. Hustling to make my numbers, I often thought of the Joni Mitchell lyric from “Free Man in Paris”: “You know I’d go back there tomorrow but for the work I’ve taken on. Stoking the star-maker machinery behind the popular song.” (This was perhaps a touch dramatic.)

What we didn’t realize was that we were working within a bubble. A flimsy bubble erected by Facebook, Google, and, to a lesser extent, Twitter. These organizations were sending people to news stories, viral stories, all the stories. (And they each had different motives for doing so.) In retrospect, the bubble effect was particularly noticeable in humor stories. Someone would write a good Daily Shouts and it would ride wave after wave of virality. I have joyous memories of watching “I Am a Leaf Blower” and “Sorry for the Delayed Response” sail through the Facebook seas. You felt as if you launched the ship. The spirts of the editors would rise and fall with the position of their stories on the “Most Popular” list.

Everyone likes the metrics when they are going up. But when the social media networks turned off the flow, and we got used to Presidential craziness and we got tired of reading about the pandemic, everyone’s traffic went down. There also seemed to be, on the part of media organizations, a healthy turn away from counting sheer numbers of visitors and a turn toward a real understanding of the loyal audience. I was in meetings when I was given the paths that these loyal readers took through the Web site: they read this, this, and then this! It was like chasing an elusive squirrel.

I believe the data can be parsed, and it can tell you true stories about your readership. But I also believe that the data can be presented in a way that it can tell you stories that you want to hear. Oh look, people like our long stuff! Oh look, stories about psychology tend to attract new readers who have not visited the site before! I could be wrong but my sense is that most editors, like me, have kind of thrown in the towel with metrics. There felt like a moment, early on, where they might offer some new kind of insight or “Moneyball”-type advantage. But we are now firmly in a time when we need people to subscribe to stay alive, and what makes a person subscribe? Perhaps it’s a particular sentence in the fiction story, or something heard on a magazine podcast, or a good quip in the classical music review. This is going to sound New Age, but a magazine is really about creating a vision, an aura, an aspirational sense of style, acumen, and poise. I want this thing in my life. I want this kind of writing and art and insight in my life. I might even pay for it. ◊