Twitter's New CEO, Streaming Wars Are Over, Traffic's Lessons

Ben Smith is the author of Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. He's also the editor-in-chief of Semafor. He joins Ranjan Roy and Alex Kantrowitz for our weekly news recap show. We cover: 1) New Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino 2) Tucker Carlson's move to Twitter 3) End of the streaming wars 4) Trump's CNN Interview 5) Lessons from Ben's book, Traffic 6) Mark Zuckerberg's jiu-jitsu prowess. You can find Ben's book here. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 0:45Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. We are joined today by Ben Smith. He is the author of Traffic Genius: Rivalry and Illusion in the Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral. And he's been on the podcast circuit, but we're going to break down the week's news, including some really interesting stories about the new CEO of Twitter, the latest on Google's new products at Google I/O. We're also going to cover Tucker Carlson moving his show to Twitter, and CNN's interview with Trump. And at the end, we'll round out with some discussion of Ben's book. Welcome to the show, Ben. Thanks so much for having me on this broadcast. And we're also joined, as always, by Ron John Roy. Welcome, Ron John.

• 1:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hey, Alex. Happy Friday.

• 1:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Listen, I have a bit of a crackly mic today, so I just want to apologize in advance. We'll have it fixed by next week, but definitely want to post the audio. And I think we should just get started by talking about the big story of the week, which is that Twitter finally seems like it's going to have a CEO other than Elon Musk. The Washington Post has reported that Elon Musk has selected NBC Universal's Chairman of Global Advertising and Partnerships, Linda Iaccarino, to be the new CEO of Twitter. Ben, I'm curious, what do you think is the case that Iaccarino can be successful inside Twitter? Someone from a big network coming over to a social network?

• 2:35Speaker 01

  I mean, in some sense, she's the best imaginable hire for him. And, you know, if the first thing he had done was hired her and turned the company over to her, like the ad industry and the markets would have totally fallen in love with the story, probably. She's, you know, the advertising world is like a real kind of like community where people know each other, and she is just a total pillar of that community. Somebody to spread, I actually don't know her politics. There've been lots of speculation about her politics based on like her Twitter followers and things, or who she follows. She's certainly perceived inside the industry as like the one Trump supporter who everybody in that industry loves. Again, but I've never talked to her about it and don't know her actual politics,

• 3:19Speaker 01

  but the perception of her, like among her friends, is that like they forgive her, her deviations to the right because she's such a pillar of that community. And so, to the degree that, um, yeah, I mean, they had a really big ad business that, and they couldn't, and their costs, you know, were swallowing every dollar they brought in. I mean, in a kind of normal world, you'd be like, wow, like maybe she could bring back that huge multi-billion dollar ad business that Elon trashed, and the costs could stay low, and good for Twitter. I mean, it sounds like her title is CEO, but she's actually the head salesperson. And Musk is going to continue to run product and actually even pre Musk, the knock on Twitter was that the out of control product people ran the place and would never listen to the ad side.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  And the core problem with its ad business isn't that, you know, they didn't have well liked salespeople, it's that Musk was doing things that advertisers hated, like bringing, you know, Nazis back onto the platform and, and, you know, bring and give and promoting Tucker Carlson is something advertisers hate on Fox and it's something they'll hate on, on Twitter. So I, I think that it just like, if she actually gets input on the product, maybe it'll bring advertisers back. If she's just going out and sort of selling what Elon is doing to the market, it's hard to see how that really works.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Do you guys think, one, this is actually going to happen? Or do you think this is another Elon Musk grabbed the news cycle and tried to put some kind of positive spin on the Twitter as a company? And I guess, and the second thing, what would she have to do to actually gain the trust of advertisers back? I mean, is it like Elon stops tweeting? Is it they actually have to come up with some kind of new innovation around their ad products? Cause I think Elon, I mean, his Twitter feed obviously is a negative for advertisers anyways, but Twitter's ad product was not very good for so many years. Like, I mean, it never came close to where Facebook and Instagram and all these other, even TikTok got to.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I, let's see. I mean, I think, I actually bet you Elon's personal tweets, like, you know, if she can say, look, the chairman of our company sometimes tweets weird stuff, but lots of people tweet weird stuff and he's not making, and he's not the one making decisions about what gets shown next to your ads, that's probably fine. If. You know, but if they're getting complaints from customers and employees that their ads are turning up on neo-Nazi, adjacent to lots of neo-Nazis and that the platform, or just that the platform is Fox News, like that's sort of probably an unsolvable problem. Like, not that Fox doesn't have a good advertising business, but, you know, she's coming from

• 6:09Speaker 01

  NBC, one of the world's great advertising companies that just, you know, rakes in billions and billions and billions of dollars by selling morning, you know, The Today Show or, you know, a range of primetime dramas that are like profoundly inoffensive, basically, because that is ultimately what advertisers want. And, and I don't know. I mean, and the real problem, I mean, I think the ad products on Twitter were always a mess, but also the appeal of Twitter was that you were, as an advertiser, sort of plugging directly into the culture and into the sort of, into the conversation. And that, but the, if the conversation is a nightmare, you probably don't want to do that. And I think there's

• 6:51Speaker 01

  just a question of whether she's empowered to move the product back to a place where advertisers want to be. Because they actually, like, people complain about the advertising product, maybe, you know, what was it, a $7 billion advertising business? And that Elon has knocked down maybe 50 or 60%, but like, that's, that's a big business. That's not, I would, I would be, I would like to have a $7 billion advertising business at summer4.com, which all your viewers should sign up for.

• 7:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes. So, look, it does, it does seem kind of impossible, though. I mean, if, there's no way to shift the Twitter product, in my opinion, to something that's going to actually appeal to NBC advertisers, right? The whole thing is Twitter has tried to appeal to these brand advertisers, but it's been a direct response platform measured against the, you know, type of advertising you would do on Facebook or Snapchat and hasn't been able to deliver.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  I think that's an unfair comparison, measured against Facebook. Facebook is the world's best advertising mass trap, but measured against The New York Times or, you know, any other news publisher. Because ultimately, they have the downside of being kind of in the news business. I think they built a huge, you could say they were the biggest news, news advertising business in the world. Like, I think they, you know, they've managed to lose money on that quite large business, but... You know, they had, I think, like, they had advertisers who liked them, advertisers who were sick of them, you know, whatever. But their biggest problem was that they were losing money, not that they weren't selling ads, I think.

• 8:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, that'll be the task. I mean, if you're gonna try to bring someone in to change the advertising business, she definitely makes sense. But it's also interesting that Elon has, like, been strongly opposed, not strongly opposed, but been trying to shift the company away from advertising. Maybe this is an admission from him that he does need those advertising dollars and is bringing in a heavy hitter from a network to do it.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, what's most interesting to me is that he could have brought in a CEO whose real experience was in building subscription consumer products, or building, like, linear television for a network that was based around Tucker Carlson, or someone who had worked on, you know, the creation of, like, Alipay, or WeChat, or one of these everything apps he talked about. But he really brought in, you know, like, one of America's leading ad salespeople. And so, like, suggests that they think the ad business is where they're going.

• 9:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. In which case, you would have to have almost like a, if you're Elon, you'd probably want to wipe clean the first six months of running Twitter and try to start over.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Are you telling me it's not gonna be a payments app, and an everything app, and a subscription service, and all of the above?

• 9:26Speaker 01

  I mean, I do hope Lyndy Acquino got some kind of paperwork that gives her recourse and gets her paid if tomorrow he decides, actually, never mind. Because his description of what she does as CEO in a tweet was not what a typical CEO does. Typical CEO runs the company. He sort of said, well, I'll run the company and she'll sell the ads.

• 9:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, she's gonna have some inventory to run against because Tucker Carlson this week announced that he's gonna be bringing his show to Twitter. And it's gonna be interesting to see because this type of stuff, as you noted in Semaphore, doesn't typically work on Twitter. I think you had somebody who had used to work at Twitter talk about what the problem is with Programming on the app and they referred to it as doom scrolling versus doom staying, right? And he said, the notion, or this person said, the notion that Carlson could build a significant video business on Twitter was stupid. So what do you think the prospects are that this app might actually be programmed, you know, like a cable network and have more

• 10:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  tune in programming? I mean, Elon also reached out to Don Lemon, told him, told him to do a show on Twitter as well.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  What Elon's doing is he is sort of speed running through everything Twitter's already tried, which doesn't say, maybe it was early. I mean, who knows? But there was a sort of a thought in, gosh, I think in 2015, maybe when Anthony Noto was there, that they could, that linear television, that they, you know, they could basically develop a slate. And one of the ways to access Twitter was sort of as an on-demand video platform, or as a live video platform. And AM to DM, this show we produced at BuzzFeed was part of that strategy. And it was pretty good. And so I think it kind of survived past having a strategic logic for them. But I think, yeah, the big problem is, I mean, I, as a

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Twitter addict, have never probably watched more than a minute linear on Twitter. Like it just, it's not the behavior of the user to lean back and, you know, it's a lean forward doom platform, not a lean back doom platform. And maybe there's some experience or subscription service where you would go to Twitter and do a thing that's just totally different from the thing you usually do on Twitter. But I think that's just like a challenge. Like, I don't know how, I don't know how Netflix Shorts are working. You know, Netflix has this TikTok-like product, but, and maybe lots of people go to Netflix to use a TikTok clone. But I just think it's harder than people realize. It's just hard to, you know, to get people to totally change their behavior on your platform.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  Elon said, just remember that he did not, he did engage with Tucker Carlson directly to bring him to the platform? Or was he trying to deny that he actually was, he pay him in any way, or try to like come up with some exclusive deal?

• 12:14Speaker 01

  We don't know. I mean, I think it's, I think Musk had said, there's no deal, but it's, I'm not really sure what that means.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah. No, I mean, it is interesting in terms, especially with like Blue Sky now being the hot new place and where Twitter is trying to go strategically. But I guess it just reminds of any other kind of Musk. Musk business. Do you guys think is Tucker Carlson, would he be reneging on his contract with Fox News? Or would what would be the monetary impact on him to make a move like this?

• 12:47Speaker 01

  I mean, I think the thing with Carlson is he's one of these folks who can probably make even more money than he made at Fox, selling his services to the highest bidder, you know, somewhere like Rumble or Newsmax or the Daily Wire.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  Where where does Rumble get the money?

• 13:04Speaker 01

  They're publicly traded.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Oh, OK, OK, because I saw, yeah, the 20 million, 30 million out of nowhere.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, they've been throwing $10 million deals at like much less famous people. And so and they're, I think, probably quite desperate to break through because they're clearly not breaking through. And so he'd be worth a lot to them. So there's this trade off, though, where it's like, does he want to make a bunch of money and like, you know, it'd have much, much less influence. I mean, that's kind of the trade off, right? And there's nowhere that he can go like Fox where he's going to where the I mean, the crazy thing about Fox, he was talking to people who who were kind of persuadable. He's basically talking to elderly, regular Republicans and pulling them into this kind of populist crusade. That's a different thing from the Republican Party. He can now, I think, go out and talk to his own followers.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  But it's a less influence. It's less influential and there's, you know, I mean, I think Glenn Beck in his day had a lot of heat and didn't really manage to preserve influence, although I suspect he made quite a bit of money.

• 14:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, Ben, it was kind of interesting in your story because you referenced Carlson as the leader of the populist wing of the Republican Party. And, you know, to me, I always thought that that was Donald Trump. So I'm curious why you put Tucker in that position and whether you think that part of what he might do is think about running for president in 24.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I guess that's sort of how I think of him. Um, yeah, but I, but I, he could run for, he could certainly run for president. There's certainly a logic to him, like, just cynically, like, it would, it would make, it would make, keep and make him hyper-relevant, basically, and keep him in the game, just to float the speculation, although it doesn't seem like he really has been. He's also been very, I think, part of what sort of radicalized him is a sense that, that his enemies were sort of threatening his family and violating his privacy. And obviously, if what you want is your, is sort of to keep your life private, running for president is a really bad way to do that. Do you think that was real, or is that just for show? Um, I mean, there were protesters banging on his door in his home in DC, and his wife

• 15:11Speaker 01

  was pretty freaked out. I mean, I think that was real. But, but how people, you know, but he certainly is out there saying super-inflammatory stuff and driving protesters to other people's homes and is, I mean, I don't, yeah, no, but I, I mean, I do, yeah, I actually do think that part of his current fairly radical politics is driven, at least by his own sense, that he is personally embattled and threatened. Yeah.

• 15:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, we're seeing, right now, also, this move of lots of network TV folks to digital, some by choice, some not exactly by their choice. It's kind of interesting, because there is this momentum for digital, but you are also looking at what's happening in the streaming wars, and it's ugly. So, Disney reported earnings this week, it lost 4 million subscribers, and there's this new narrative that's taking place, that the streaming wars are over, right? You had Disney, Netflix, Amazon, the list goes on, companies trying to program online and thinking that there would be endless growth there for their streaming businesses. And now, like, you're seeing a real tail-off with Netflix, you're seeing this, I mean, a massive loss of subscribers for Disney.

• 16:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, I'm curious, Ben, if you agree with this idea that the streaming wars are over, and if so, doesn't it just leave digital in a much more diminished place versus narrative television?

• 16:30Speaker 01

  I mean, I guess I don't really buy the distinction anymore between digital and narrative television. I mean, Disney is, I mean, I mean, this, this sort of, the moment when the markets would let you dump unlimited money into streaming for growth certainly is over. And I think it's just a much more mixed picture. I think I'm pretty, I'm pretty sure Disney's losses came in part because they lost the rights to cricket in India. Which is a huge, you know, which is a very

• 16:56Speaker 02

  What?

• 16:56Speaker 01

  traditional television fight. Like some, an Indian broadcaster got the rights and, or a streamer and Disney lost them and a bunch of people canceled their subscriptions, which is like a totally normal reason people change the channel. And, and I think it's sort of, I mean, to me, it's more just that this sort of convergence between between the different platforms is competing, is completing the notion that there's this totally different thing called streaming that has totally different economics and that you can invest in infinitely. I mean, maybe, I mean, I think, I don't think it was bad. I mean, it obviously was not a mistake of Netflix to invest a lot and grab a lot of market share. But it does, it's, but clearly that moment has now passed. And so, but yeah.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  I, I think this is not the worst thing in the world. A, a part of me even feels, I know, I joked around with John, who I write margins with, that Ozark, the latest season should not have been done, but was one of the last vestiges of Zerp in that there's just too much capital, so they'll just make anything. I mean, I feel there's so many series that could be movies and just two hours, but instead get stretched out to eight to 10 episodes just because they had to produce that much. So I think from a quality control perspective, it's not the worst thing that a streaming services will cut back. Um, but I think what, who's going to win in this? Like, it feels like right now, everyone is losing billions of dollars and bleeding money.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  But still, you know, everyone's behavior, even my parents now, watch streaming services and watch movies on streaming, like every, it's become so ingrained in our behavior that who's going to win? Like someone has to, right?

• 18:41Speaker 01

  I mean, it seems like right now, everybody's losing, right? Um, but I, but I guess I actually feel like for if you're like, I think NBC is a very interesting element here, which under invested in this stuff is now trying to play catch up with Peacock, which feels like it's not particularly catching on. And if you want to stream something amazing, that show Mrs. Davis, which is on Peacock is fabulous, but I don't think anybody's watching it because it's on Peacock. Um, that said, you know, they, um, built all this in the context of this huge advertising business of Lindy Acarino's giant advertising business, in fact. And, and it feel, and, and, you know, it sort of remained a television company in a very,

• 19:22Speaker 01

  in a fairly fundamental way, did not transform themselves into a company, like, didn't transform the logic of their business into this subscription business hedged all over the place. And I sort of think that that's what we'll see more of is mixed business models and complicated businesses and movies getting theatrical releases when that makes sense and less sort of ideology and more kind of calculation. I think when you look at big media businesses like Disney over time and you say like, hey, what business are they in? Like, what's their secret? The answer is often pretty confusing. It's like, well, they're in like 14 different businesses and like the margins on cruises are pretty good and but, but like they manage them all really well. And like there are these executives like Bob Chapek, sort of like wandering around

• 20:06Speaker 01

  the mid senior ranks of the companies with, with 200,000 people reporting to them who's, you know, running businesses that like, we don't really understand that well, like cruises and parks.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Alex, who do you think's gonna win?

• 20:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't know. I mean, I would have said Amazon. I think that they just have much more incentive to invest the money that the others don't have that, uh, don't have, and they can lose more and that still works for their business. So I'm on team Amazon on this one, but I don't know. They've, it's, it's tough. You have to just keep churning out hits and their ability to do so has been kind of limited. So what do you think, Rajan?

• 20:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, Amazon's an interesting one because at a certain point, though, as their e-commerce business starts taking a hit and losing money, as their margins on cloud start to compress and the business that has been growing insanely over the last decade starts to slow a bit, where do they look to cut? And I think video might be that place. Because again, having video as just an add-on to Prime that everyone's going to subscribe to anyway for two-day shipping, I don't think is the most compelling place to invest so much money. But I mean, they still certainly are with the NFL and everything else. So I mean, they're still making moves. But yeah, I like, I think I'm Team NBC. I think I'm

• 21:30Speaker 02

  in for, I don't know why Linda leaves when you're potentially at the winning place, but...

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kind of interesting, right? That NBC, which looked like it was a laggard, now looks kind of like it didn't over torque toward it streaming, although, yeah, although it's now frantically trying to catch up. So who knows? I actually converted to Peacock for Eurovision myself. So go for it here.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  One of Peacock, I'm a proud Peacock subscriber as well. And I mean, they even, they're the first place I saw they have, like, when you pause a show, an ad comes up, which I think is actually like a good, smart ad innovation. So I think Ben's point makes sense is that it's like a commercially driven organization. So they're actually smart about the entire business rather than a pure content first, you know, business that tries to tack on a business model afterwards.

• 22:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I'm with you. I think building, well, maybe this is it, that if you start building late, but that late coincides with the new economic environment where you're not in the Zerp world anymore, you might actually have a chance to build something sustainable. Okay, let's do, why don't we do one more media story, then take a break and then talk a little bit about your book, Ben. All right. Did you guys watch the CNN interview with Trump? So there's been this big debate about like whether CNN should have done it in the first place. Some people are like, you know, it's effectively serving as a campaign platform for Trump. And others are just like, well, you interview newsmakers. That's the job of a journalist. So Ben, I'm kind of curious what you, first of all, what you made of the interview and second, what you think about that debate.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  I have three thoughts. One is I think that Caitlin Collins did a very good job. That is a very hard thing and she sort of held her ground and really pushed him. The second was that the audience was sort of a mistake, I think. Like it felt and sounded like a hominidously pro-Trump cheering squad, which did. I mean, there's a reason they have laugh lines on TV, right? Like it conveyed a sort of sense of support for him. But and they could have done it, they could have avoided that. But the biggest problem is just that, like, Trump was always going to turn it into a sparring match between heroic Donald Trump and evil CNN. And so like, the thing that CNN is trying to rebrand itself as a neutral

• 23:49Speaker 01

  platform that is as open to Republicans as Democrats. But Trump comes on and doesn't treat it like the platform. He treats it like the antagonist. And when you're being and Caitlin has to push him. And then he lies a lot. And then at the end, Jake Tapper comes on and just sort of eviscerates him for lying. And if you're a viewer, if you're a viewer, you're either on Trump's side or against him. And he for and Trump forces that dynamic. And if CNN's goal is to sort of, and it was just totally understandable, to sort of reclaim its brand as a neutral news platform, like Trump just isn't going to give you that. Like, that's not why he went on. He went on to show he could go into the lion's den and that requires CNN to be the lion. And so I don't really know how it serves that brand goal.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Like, they got a modest rating bump, not as much a bump as they got when they got Joe Biden on. But, um, like, that that goal of reclaiming CNN's old brand is just, it's very elusive, I think.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do not understand what the purpose of it was. And the CNN CEO, I think it was Brian Stelter was tweeting about how, uh, he talked about how they made news. And again, like, the idea is they're supposed to cover the news, not make news. But it's a reminder that he's proud of the idea of actually CNN as a network making news. And I think, I like that point that, like, That Ben made that, you know, CNN has to be the lion if he's going into the lion's den, because it is. If you watched it, it was just nonstop back and forth. And then afterwards, again, it felt like we're back in 2016 where Jake Tapper comes on and says the word falsehood, which is the most ridiculous word, instead of saying lie and saying that he made falsehood

• 25:30Speaker 02

  over and over again. And again, yeah, it's all, it's just like deja.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Okay, but yeah, but the thing is, nobody, I mean, actually, I didn't even notice that. I thought he did a pretty good job fact checking Trump. But like, there's no Trump supporter who is like, oh, I'm glad he said falsehood rather than lie. And then there's nobody who dislikes Trump who's like, well, I'm glad they fact checked him afterward. Like, there was no constituency.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  And I think we all learned that fact checking is not an effective way to deal with Donald Trump. Like, that's, it's just almost irrelevant to the whole, like, you know, the idea, like, we got him. We caught him and we showed.

• 26:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Maybe I'm the only one that feels this way in the group. I don't know. I'm curious what Ben thinks. But I think it was actually good to interview him. I mean, he is the frontrunner in the Republican field. He is likely going to be the nominee. The idea is, if you're in journalism, you're going to ask this person questions. And I think that was what Chris Lick said afterwards was was pretty interesting, which is like, America has a better understanding of this candidate now than they did in the first place.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Like, like, like everything involving Trump. This was mutually assured destruction. This was bad for CNN and bad for Donald Trump. Congratulations, everyone.

• 26:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Why? Yeah. Well, why bad for Trump?

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Because he's out there talking about abortion, most of all.

• 26:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. And by the way, like, I mean, that's what, isn't, I mean, I think that what journalism should do is also like, get these people to talk about the things that they might not want to talk about. Have them clarify their positions.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure. I think it was good journalism. Actually, maybe that maybe is what I should say. I think it was good journalism. Unfortunately, like, the reality of cable news is that it's televised. Like, that's its deepest reality. And it was not effective, like, it wasn't good television. It was just good journalism. I think.

• 27:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  I thought I, I don't know.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  It was entertaining television. I mean, I guess I just mean like it didn't. I think CNN was trying to do a thing with it and it did not do that thing.

• 27:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Ben, I'm curious, there's some, oh, go ahead.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, but maybe that's too cynical. I like, I do think it's good that they, that, I mean, of course, you sort of have no choice. Like if Trump were downstairs and wanted to like join this podcast, I would let him in and, you know, we would talk to him.

• 27:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, let's take a break and come back and talk about your book, Ben. We're here on Big Technology Podcast, Friday Edition with Ron John Roy, the author of Margins on Substack, Ben Smith, editor in chief of Semaphore and also the author of Traffic, Genius Rivalry, Rivalry and Delusion in the Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral. It's out in all bookstores available now, so you can go pick it up. We're going to talk about the book and some more media stories, including, well, and some more tech stories as well, including Mark Zuckerberg's recent jujitsu championship. Coming back right after this. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Copilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about.

• 28:26Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 29:16Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 30:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Ben Smith, the author of Traffic, Genius Rivalry, and Delusion: In the Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral. Ron Jon Roy is also here with us. He's the author of Margins on Substack. Ben, I'm kind of curious, like, you've done kind of the most extensive podcast book tour maybe in history. Have you learned anything that you didn't know, you know, about the stuff that you were covering as you went about this podcast tour? Like, what are the new perspectives, angles, or facts that have come to light for you since you've been speaking about this book?

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, actually, the single thing that I felt most like, oh, this was such an interesting conversation, and I wish I'd done more of it, is, you know, the book sort of traces the sort of origin story of this moment, starting in Manhattan, sort of back in the aughts, and through these characters, you know, Jonah Peretti and Nick Denton, and also Andrew Breitbart is a really big character in it. But Breitbart, you know, died in 2012. And I think 2012, I may have the exact date wrong, but died, you know, really just as he was becoming this sort of major public figure. And... I was talking to somebody on a conservative podcast who said, you know, you should have picked up that story because this whole world of conservative media now

• 31:38Speaker 01

  is really a fight for his particular legacy among his acolytes. And that Ben Shapiro worked for him and Ben Shapiro has built, you know, has built what is, I think, you know, in some sense, it's not anti-Trump, but it is basically Republican, a Republican conservative media outlet that is trying to, you know, that connects with younger people and that is not a like Trump boosting platform at The Daily Wire. Meanwhile, Steve Bannon turned Breitbart into this crusading, hyper-politicized, immigration-focused, racist, pro-Trump outlet. And that there were these different streams kind of coming out of his death from people, Ben Dominick at The Federalist is another, who had been in some way or other connected to him.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  And I just think that's actually a great story that somebody ought to write.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think for me, reading the book, the most fascinating part really was seeing all these kind of lines drawn, Ben Shapiro working for Breitbart, even, I had no idea about Breitbart being part of the Huffington Post founding story and how that all played out. So I think seeing all these lines drawn was really interesting. And actually, I mean, even thinking about Tucker Carlson going to Twitter today, you know, this day and age, one of the more interesting parts to me was the line between kind of Jezebel and the culture wars or cancel culture, just kind of how culture plays out on social media, or the commenting in Gawker or Kenja, let's say, and how that kind of

• 33:08Speaker 02

  played out and evolved into social media battles of today. Yeah, there's no question even from my side. I just wanted to relay that part.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think those were for me, like. Yeah, I mean, I would say in terms of sort of what surprised me in the reporting of the book, those were the things also, like that, first of all, that when you sort of go back and look at the, that early world of social media, which like thought of itself as progressive. And I think mostly was an Obama supporting world of young people who thought what they were doing was in part getting Barack Obama elected, including the people at Facebook. You sort of look back and it's like, oh, look, like there's Andrew Breitbart, there's Gavin McInnes, co-founder of Vice and the Proud Boys, there's Chris Poole, who created 4chan, working out of BuzzFeed, although, you know, there's Steve Bannon, kind of hovering around

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Huffington Post. And then, as the story progresses, they're the protagonists. I mean, they're the ones who actually inherit the earth at some level and certainly inherit the internet. And that was, even though I had lived through it, kind of a surprise to me to see how that was sort of embedded in the whole thing from the start. And the other big surprise actually was Jezebel. Like when I was sort of thinking, you know, who, what's the, like, the real moment of, like, the first time you really see what, like, what the internet feels like in 2016, it really is 2007 on Jezebel, where they both had this incredible kind of like power to make social change, often in like, both in sort of serious ways and in really fun, silly ways. Like, my favorite

• 34:41Speaker 01

  thing is they launched with a Photoshop bounty, where they offered a $10,000 bounty to anybody who could come up with an unretouched image from a glossy magazine. And they, somebody actually like stole a photo from Redbook, and of Faith Hill, where she still had her freckles and her smile lines, which had been photoshopped out. And that was, you know, kind of a metaphor for what they were doing overall, which was presenting sort of something like more honest than the mainstream media. And yet also, in particular, the women at Jezebel in 07 developed this totally pathological relationship with their commenters, who drove them nuts, who were...

• 35:18Speaker 01

  You know, who sort of tried to keep them in line when they strayed and canceled them in a certain way, when they really, when they got out of line. I don't know. It's really, it was interesting to see like, oh, wow, this was all here then.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  Wait, so, but one thing, I'm curious, like Jezebel, and I thought that was really interesting how it came out at a time where it really was a reaction to overly glossy, photoshopped fashion magazines and kind of taking on big media. And then, as you see, Gawker is going against more establishment media. BuzzFeed rises through going against establishment media. Like, did that culture eventually become the establishment? Because in some ways, it felt like that would have been the ending. But then, if you look at where companies are right now, and we all just literally said NBC is going to be the big winner in streaming video, like, did establishment media win?

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think these old brands had more power than we expected and absorbed a lot of like the, I mean, for better and for worse, the ideas and the people from these upstarts, but ultimately, you know, had turned out to have a lot more staying power than we thought. I mean, that obviously was surprising to me.

• 36:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Ben, one of the through lines in your, in your interviews has been looking at the delusion word in your subhead. And, you know, it presents itself as a sort of fact in the subhead. The word delusion is there without a question mark. But you've now started to ask like whether it was delusional or not. And, you know, from your perspective, what I've heard is that the idea was to build a media company, which I'm talking about BuzzFeed News here, build a media company that would distribute its, its news on the social platforms and eventually get paid for it, get paid to program, like we talked about the AM to DM show that we did on Twitter when we were at BuzzFeed News. I, you know, I, I'd like,

• 37:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  actually, hearing you speak about that over the course of your interviews was definitely like illuminating to me in terms of what the bet was. And I've been trying to think myself, like, was this delusional or was it not? And? You know, on one hand, like, it makes complete sense to go all in on a business strategy, but on the other hand, like, there actually is money to be made from these platforms. And the question is, like, whether it was on the scale that BuzzFeed hoped and whether, like, uh, whether the delusional part was like to think it was gonna be that big versus, like, to think it was gonna be there at all.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Well, well, well, these companies are very, they're, they're very interested in what they call creators, which is a sort of term invented by the platforms to ensure that, like, they interact with atomized individuals rather than cartels who could exercise leverage. I mean, it's sort of like Uber would like to, would like to connect to individual drivers, not to taxi fleets.

• 38:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wow, that, that is a hot take.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  And I think, and I think Google, and I think Google and everybody else, you know, would like to incentivize individual creators, but does not want them organizing into taxi fleets. And so, they will pay them as little as they can get away with paying them to stay on the platform, but they won't share, they're not gonna share the value the way, you know, the way like Comcast, as the, you know, where the way, the way the cable company shares the value with Viacom. I mean, and I think the question is, would, was there ever a possibility that places, the places like Facebook would, and I think part of the answer, what the world that we saw emerging, which didn't emerge, was one in which there were competing social platforms.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Like, it wasn't just one Facebook with infinite leverage because it had a monopoly on sort of, on, on, on attention for a time, but that there would be four Facebooks, right? In which case, they're each, you know, bidding on the services of the highest value media, wherever it comes from. And, and yeah, we imagined a world where that takes them in this sort of evolution, competitive evolution, upmarket, out of user-generated content, into professional content, and ultimately, you know, creates a sort of a market for media that just absolutely never developed, and everybody who didn't think it was gonna happen at the time now says, "See, you guys were idiots," probably rightly.

• 39:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, why don't we end on our on our fun story of the week? I don't know if you guys saw, well, I know Ranjan saw, but Mark Zuckerberg posted some pictures last weekend of him kicking the business out of somebody in a jujitsu competition. And Ranjan, you wrote that it sort of shows that's you show you wrote that it was some multitasking going on as he's trying to win the AI war and working through layoffs at his company.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, so for context, Mark Zuckerberg posted a photo of him like sitting on a dude's head while beating him up in Brazilian jujitsu. I had tweeted about how he should not be posting photos of like time consuming hobbies when when Facebook is, you know, deep into the AI wars and well behind competitors like Microsoft. But also like, and I will say, this is one of my first experiences of just an entire blue check brigade coming after me. You have been commenting that Twitter is getting to be a worse place, but that was definitely my first experience.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  My one thing on this is, one, when you're laying off thousands of people, showing that you have a really time consuming hobby is a bit ridiculous, but also, when is Zuckerberg going to post a photo of him getting beat up or him losing? That's what I want to see. Everything he posts is him. He's apparently the strongest, most competitive, tough person out there. When he posts a picture of some guy on top of him, then I'll be happy.

• 41:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Well, I'll just end by saying congratulations to Mark Zuckerberg for winning a two person competition. And whenever you want to go in the ring, I'm ready to take you on. Okay, thank you so much, Ben Smith, for joining us. Traffic is a terrific, it's a terrific book. Really, really enjoy it. We have people in the comments saying they like it. I'm sure Ranjan liked it as well. So everybody can go pick it up today. It's called Traffic: Genius Rivalry and Delusion in the Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral. We'll link it in the show notes and we hope to see you next week. So thank you, Ranjan. Thank you, Ben. On Wednesday, I have a really wild interview coming out. I spoke with, I think I should say earmuffs to Ben on this one, so they don't get ahead

• 42:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  of me on this, but I spoke with one of the people that trained ChatGPT in Africa as part of an outsourced division that OpenAI was working with, and you're not going to want to miss the story. All right. Thanks again. And we will see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 42:29Speaker 03

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