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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 sophisticated like me.

You know, the ins and outs of the history of how in the odd 2000s, New York City became text media center. These were smart, cool sophisticated.

Creating things like Buzzfeed and Gawker and Huff Poe and the new kind of social media. These people were hip, clever, they were gossipy and flirted at hipster parties, just, 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 ruined it all because they're getting so many clicks at the value of a single click becomes much smaller and these smaller websites stopping money as Ben says.

That is a perfect summary. The core problem was that we were selling this commodity that would be 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. People didn't want to read high-minded politics. What they really wanted was pornography and Gawker published a video of Hulk Hogan having sex with his friend's wife.

And well, Hogan sued and Gawker lost. Well, billionaire Peter Teele financed that lawsuit and put Gawker out of business.

Now that's the salacious highlight of the book and end of this podcast. But Ben Smith moved on from Buzzfeed to the New York Times and has a very serious well-sourced, well-resourced news organization Semaphore.

And you should definitely check that that website out for a top-of-the-line news source that isn't the New York Times or the Washington Post.

So here we are with Ben Smith in traffic. It's a great one. You know for a change.

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