And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [73]
But to my surprise, when I made the site partisan, the traffic began to drop off—a little bit when it was an anti-Republican site, and then a lot when it became an anti-Democrat site:
FIG. 5-5—OPPODEPOT PHASE TWO
The volatility of the bipartisan site was far greater, but the average daily traffic was markedly higher: 617 visitors per day versus 546 for the anti-Republican version and 297 for the anti-Democrat version. And, of course, none of these outcomes could by any stretch of the imagination be called “viral.” All told, I had spent more than $2,200 on Google ads, plus a few hundred more for web hosting, to attract 38,000 visitors in total—less than a quarter of what the Right-Wing New York Times, which netted me $2,500, had gotten for free. I had intended to find out if I could make American politics any more cynical; but from where I now sat, thousands of dollars poorer and the owner of an unpopular repository of political dirt, the most cynical person in American politics was apparently me.
VOTE THE SAME
Rather than wallow in the despondency that is the failed mememaker’s inevitable lot, I decided to pay a visit to Jonah Peretti. His startup, BuzzFeed, had since been funded and launched, and it had set up offices in Chinatown on an open, smartly renovated floor just above an illegal Chinese gambling parlor. At a computer monitor he showed me around the BuzzFeed site, which zeroed in on new trends in online conversation by crawling thousands of blogs and analyzing them using a technology called “acceleration detection”—i.e., the search for ramped-up attention. When the site’s editors saw interesting connections pop up on the trend detector, they would then write them up as items in a humorously ironic style. The week I visited, new “trends” included “Inarticulate White People” (after minor gaffes by Mitt Romney and John McCain), “Girl-on-Girl Feel-Ups” (linking a number of minor incidents involving female celebrities), “Husbands Taking Their Wives’ Names” (after a USA Today article on the subject sparked some online conversation), and “Shower Caps” (after the rapper Snoop Dogg took to wearing one out and about). Browsing through the BuzzFeed archives was already an enjoyable stroll through a cultural graveyard: the headstones of trends birthed and then left to perish.
For my part, I showed him OppoDepot, and I could tell by his face that he knew it was a hopeless case. Quite charitably he declined to say so, and he helpfully suggested some skullduggery I might employ to turn the situation around. For example, I could change candidates’ Wikipedia entries and justify my changes with links to the OppoDepot site. I could post Craigslist listings for jobs—e.g., “Looking for database programmer; fun environment to work in”—on employment boards, which might drive curious would-be applicants to view the site. Or, Jonah said, “you could create false rumors. You could have one of the candidates’ pages be filled with real softballs—and then spread the rumor that that candidate created the site.” They were inspired suggestions, but I knew that they couldn’t possibly work. There was something about the political climate that OppoDepot had misgauged.
That very week, it so happened, Jonah had helped the Huffington Post unmask the maker of the biggest political meme of the moment: an anti-Hillary Clinton video on YouTube that was an homage to Apple Computer’s famous “1984” advertisement. Posted by an anonymous YouTube user named ParkRidge47, the sophisticated ad (entitled “Vote Different”) depicted an Obama supporter crashing through a Big Brother-type screen bearing Hillary Clinton’s dour visage. The video had accumulated some 500,000 views, and speculation as to the maker’s identity had found its way into scores of newspapers and television shows. “This is a historic shift from a world in