Trust me I’m lying – confessions of a media manipulator is a fascinating read. In this book, Ryan Holiday exposes the way the information economy- blogs, news sites, popular social media handles work. I picked up this book to continue the Life in Learning series that I spoke about in my post on Made to Stick. However, rather than learning about the “Dark Arts” as is mentioned on the cover page of the book, I learnt what to avoid to keep my authenticity alive.

The economy of page views being directly linked to revenue makes the world of content producers very defined in a certain manner. As a blogger (evidenced by where you are reading this), I’ve also tried to learn some of the stuff. For example how to do SEO of my posts, how to make it more readable, importance of title, meta etc. At times, I have spent time doing some of these on my posts. But, if I want to say something and it sounds right to me in passive voice, I won’t make it active to hit an arbitrary goal of only a certain percentage being passive.

However, in the world where a professional blogger’s earning is dependent on page views – posting stuff that brings in those page views is of primary importance. Holiday has shown through his experience as a media manipulator how easy it is to feed the monster so to speak. You give them controversies and they will fan the controversies to get page views and comments on the post.

The emotion that drives virality on the net is anger. If you can make people angry through your posts, they will share the post in their anger. Happiness also works, but significantly less than anger.

In part one of the book, titled “Feeding the Monster: How Blogs work” Holiday has explained the economy, the rush, the frequency, the sourcing and the writing process. In one example, he says a search on a cancer article returned articles with average ~350 words. Obviously the bloggers didn’t write those articles to inform their readers. They wrote them to bring readers to the respective pages. And those pages then can show advertisements, which eventually pay the bills and create profit for the publisher.

Personally, for me this book is a lesson in how not to be as a blogger. I will certainly hope that my posts are time well spent for you. I do edit my posts for readability, but I don’t pander to SEO. The headings say what the post is all about rather than making you want to click. This is a place for me to talk about things I love, am passionate about, things that amuse me, observations on life and of course to share any learning that I might have. As long as that is true, this blog serves its purpose.

The second section of the book is titled “The Monster attacks: What Blogs mean”. Holiday has done his all to expose the ways in which the blogs, specially the news blogs create their posts.

Getting there first matters much more than getting it right. The link economy allows the blogs to add attributions through links, which may or may not be relevant. And then they are free to write whatever they want. For example, sample this.

Dear reader, there have been certain discussions that you are dishonest in your dealings.

The blue highlight on the text makes it look legitimate. Even when I’ve linked the highlighted text with a definition of dishonesty. How many people will click the link and check whether it’s an attribution to a source, or bullshit? Attribution is assumed. And thus news gets manufactured.

When page views are the only metric that matter, anything goes in the blog world as long as that can drive traffic. Heard from sources, found on twitter, reported on Reddit, all of these are essentially rumours masquerading as news.

And when these articles get fact checked, they get updated at the bottom with certain corrections. The blog creator might also choose to create a new post as an opinion piece which compares his opinion with the new facts that have emerged. Driving more traffic and page views.

Then there is the phenomenon of iterative journalism. A story marked as developing. The story may or may not be there. But the journalist has to generate content and be in front of the readers. So then, they go through the web to find any scraps and report that continuously. The idea is that by the time the “developing story” develops fully, it’ll be a factual story. The question then is – why not wait for it to develop fully? The answer is – traffic.

I watch a movie, I think about that a bit, then if I find something worthy, I write a post on it. Whereas a live twitter review is a scene by scene impression of the viewer who is more concerned about tweets rather than the movie itself.

After reading this book, all my news goes ads free subscription model. I am assuming that getting traffic for page views so that the publisher can serve ads will not be a large concern in that model.

A large section of the second half of the book is devoted to the methods to take down someone on the web. Snark is a weapon, so is a degradation ceremony. You’ll see the online world for what it is after reading this book. In a passage from his conclusion he says –

“When intelligent people read, they ask themselves a simple question. What do I plan to do with this information? Most readers have abandoned even pretending to consider this.……… There is no practical purpose in our lives for most of what blogs produce other than distraction. When readers decide to demand quality over quantity, the economics of Internet content will change. Manipulation and marketing will immediately become more difficult.”

Being a blogger, and a long time reader of Ryan Holiday, I wanted to see the manipulation he speaks about. After reading the book, I know about the manipulation. But these have become a guidance on what to consume on the web and how not to blog. The book is brilliant and is full of characters that you have heard of. If you are in marketing or anything to do with media, I recommend this book. Maybe this will be a step in claiming your attention back.