Link Economy

Another argument that Ryan Holiday brings up is the idea of the Link Economy. The idea behind the link economy is that bloggers and websites are able to exchange traffic and information without fact checking. Anything can be linked from one site to another; the ultimate goal is to gain as many pageviews in the shortest amount of time. Holiday states, “the link economy encourages blogs to point their readers to other bloggers who are saying crazy things, to borrow from each other without verification, and to take more or less completed stories from other sites, add a layer of commentary, and turn it into something they call their own (Holiday, 2012).” Again, there is less of an emphasis on how genuine and important the information bloggers are circulating, whatever is trending is what is going to be published. We now receive our information at a very fast paced level, the link economy works perfect with the way our society has been structured around the internet and the mobility our devices serve us.

For a blogger to make serious money through blogging, they must have a strong audience presence in and out of their realms of the internet. Henry Jenkins furthers this point in his article Where Web 2.0 Went Wrong by stating, “Users generating online content are often interested in expanding their own audience and reputation. They measure their success by how many followers they attract on Twitter, just as television executives value the number of eyeballs their program attract (Jenkins, 2013).” The link economy helps bloggers ease their transition from small time bloggers to big time bloggers that appear on websites such as Buzzfeed and Gawker. These sites are usually controlled by media elites which have an immense amount of influence. A blog post is more likely to be linked to another blog site if the information provided is spreadable and featured in top sites.

The idea of the link economy is nothing new; it has proliferated in other periods of time especially during the Print Culture. Deborah Brandt’s article: The Means of Production: Literacy and Stratification at the 21^st Century states, “In this transformation, economic production came to center less on making things and more on generating new knowledge and exchanging, manipulating, or exploiting information (Brandt, 2001).” She refers to the transformation being the Knowledge Economy, in comparison, the link economy works in the same way with more of an emphasis on exploiting information. The link-based economy of blogs today goes hand in hand with the sales model of the yellow press conducted during the Print Culture. Each headline has to attract as much attention as possible, and each article is tailored to go viral and spread. What spreads most is controversy, things that strike an immediate reaction in people, things that make you angry or make you happy. In blogging negative is usually better than positive, something that makes you mad or disagree with is more likely to spread as opposed to something that you agree with.

Example of yellow press