Holy moly do we have a fascinating one today, you know, for a change.

Ben Smith on his new book, Traffic.

This is for all your sophisticates like me who know the ins and outs of the history of how in the aught 2000s, New York City became

Tech's Media Center. These were smart, cool, sophisticates, creating things like BuzzFeed and Gawker

and Huffpo and the new kind of social media. These people were hip. They were clever.

They were gossipy and flirted at hipster parties.

Just the kind of thing I had no clue about.

That's why I found traffic so at times fascinating and other times kind of disturbing.

These were smart hipsters who took no prisoners and changed history,

and one of the smartest and actually most responsible, one of them, Ben Smith, is with me to

discuss their remarkable successes and failures in the early era of social media.

Another word for traffic was clicks, and clicks are good. Clicks were money.

The more clicks, the more money. They're all getting lots of traffic, you see, but then something

happened. Facebook and Google kind of ruin it all because they're getting so many clicks that

the value of a single click becomes much smaller.

And these smaller websites stop making money, as Ben says.

That is a perfect summary.

The core problem was that we were selling this commodity that turned out to be unlimited in its quantity.

And so the price went down.

Now, Gawker went out of business because the guy who started, Nick Denton, had a different kind of ethic.

Gawker had a different ethic, as Ben described it.

It was, quote, to rip the mask off the hypocritical mainstream.

...