The story of the viral internet, as Ben Smith tells it in his new book Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, begins in 2001 with future BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti in an ill-fitting blazer, waiting to go on the Today show to explain a prank: he had tried to get Nike to make him custom shoes that said “sweatshop” on them, Nike turned him down, and the resulting email thread, when published, set the internet alight. More horseplay ensued, until there seemed to be enough for an entire website: BuzzFeed, a soupy mélange of viral clickbait, personality quizzes, and esoteric internet reporting. Unlike existing media properties, BuzzFeed’s brilliance was that it was specifically reverse engineered to be a site that favored pageviews above content. It didn’t necessarily matter if the content was good, per se. It only mattered if it clicked.
