Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral

The Bet

Jonah Peretti and his best friend at grad school, Cameron Marlow, bet on everything. The sum was always two dollars. They'd bet on the winner of a basketball game, or whether Jonah could jump up on top of a chest-high wall in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their patter was objectively kind of annoying, these two skinny graduate students with their floppy brown hair, marching around the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they'd met in the fall of 1999, trying to one-up each other. Cameron, fresh out of college at twenty-two, was one of the youngest in the new class at the MIT Media Lab, and he wore that chip on his shoulder. Jonah was twenty-five. His left-wing politics and laughing California calm failed to conceal his intense competitiveness.

So it made sense that when Jonah went viral, truly viral, for the first time, on January 5, 2001, his friend and rival wouldn't let him bask in his glory. Cameron said it was a fluke. The internet was too random, culture too unpredictable, to pull something like that off again. "Two-dollar bet," Jonah suggested automatically. He'd spend the next twenty years trying to win that bet.

January 5, 2001, was a Friday, a freezing day in Cambridge. It was the last year of the American Century, when public intellectuals were spending their time worrying about the ennui at the end of history. The question was what young Americans, having conquered the Soviet Union and dominated the world, were supposed to do next. Jonah, whose lean height and bouncy gait gave you the sense that he was about to take flight, had turned twenty-seven on New Year's Day. He and Cameron were charting the digital future from their offices looking into the Cube, the glass box at the center of the Media Lab. Cameron was working on turning old issues of Time magazine into digital visualizations. In the next office, Jonah was supposed to be completing the research project on education that had gotten him admitted to MIT from his position running a high school computer lab in New Orleans. But, in fact, Jonah was on nike.com, looking at sneakers.

The company was letting shoppers customize shoes. Jonah chose a pair of size 10 Zoom XC USA running shoes and typed "fuck" into the white box where you could put a word of your choice. The site blocked it. To test how sophisticated the system was, he tried a different word: "sweatshop." It went through, so he charged the fifty dollars to his credit card and waited for his sneakers.

Instead, he got an email from Nike. His submission violated their policies-in particular, one against "inappropriate slang."

Jonah wrote back, noting that "sweatshop" "is in fact part of standard English," defined by Webster's dictionary as a "factory in which workers are employed for long hours at low wages and under unhealthy conditions."

He received another polite rejection. He didn't mind being a little annoying, obviously, and kept writing back. And after seven emails from Nike, Jonah made one final request: "Could you please send me a color snapshot of the ten-year-old Vietnamese girl who makes my shoes?"

That was the end of his correspondence with polite Nike customer service representatives. Jonah was pleased with his prank and, in particular, the line about the Vietnamese girl, so he put all the emails in order and submitted the exchange to Harper's Magazine, hoping he could reach what was then the pinnacle of success and attention for something like that: the Harper's Readings section, a monthly-print!-compilation of odd and timely documents. The magazine declined, so on January 15, he forwarded the email to ten friends. Some forwarded it from there-it was the kind of slacker anti-corporate joke that hit at the complacent end of the Clinton era. On January 17, Jonah's old roommate from New Orleans, Tim Shey, put the text of the exchange on his personal website, something people were starting to call a blog. Then bigger websites, like MetaFilter and Slashdot, picked it up. Over the next few weeks, the email traveled from inbox to inbox, a catchy little corporate protest. Pretty soon Jonah was getting emails from newspaper reporters and, then, a booker for the biggest morning television program in America, the Today show.

On February 28, 2001, just six weeks after he forwarded that first email, Jonah was sitting nervously on a gray couch in Rockefeller Center in a gray wool Calvin Klein jacket that was too big at the shoulders and not quite long enough for his long arms. He had no real idea where to look or what to say, but told Katie Couric that he'd read some bad things in the newspapers about Nike's labor practices. That was really all he had-he didn't know much about sweatshops and was winging it. He thought Couric could sense his weakness. So she did his work for him, reading his line about Vietnamese child labor to a Nike spokesman who had joined them over video link from Phoenix. The spokesman, too, was trying to make the best of it, defending his company's labor practices-while thanking Jonah for calling attention to Nike's foray onto the internet.

"Traffic and contact between Nike and consumers is up 75 percent in some categories and 100 percent in others," the spokesman, a Nike Swoosh on his tight black T-shirt, defiantly told Couric. "There's certainly more awareness of the fact that we personalize shoes."

Couric thanked her guests and moved on to the next segment, an interview with Spin City star Heather Locklear. Jonah walked off the set feeling like an imposter. He wasn't studying economics or international relations or labor at MIT. He didn't know anything about sweatshops. What he was studying was the same thing the Nike spokesman had fixated on: he knew about traffic. As it turned out, Jonah would devote his career to collecting it and quantifying it, immersing himself in its patterns and in its power, which could equally hold Nike to account over its labor practices, or just sell sneakers.

Traffic was, literally, just the record of the request your desktop computer made of the computer hosting the article you were reading. When one of Katie Couric's producers visited Tim Shey's blog, that visit counted as one view, the elemental unit of traffic. But traffic, Jonah was among the first to discover, wasn't merely mechanical. Traffic was human emotion, human psychology, desire and curiosity and humor. It was easiest to see this sort of pattern when you felt like an outsider, an alien. Jonah sometimes looked at behavior the way the linguist Noam Chomsky, an MIT professor, looked at language. Chomsky wrote about how a Martian anthropologist would look at humans, and how simple and uniform our speech would look through alien eyes.

Jonah had been making a study of humans since kindergarten, when his mother, Della, had enrolled him in the Oakland public school system. He was a happy, gregarious little kid, the kind who babbled away to puzzled friends about the polar ice caps. The first day of kindergarten, his dad moved out. And as that year went on, Della noticed that something seemed a little wrong: this kid, so interested in ideas, had no interest at all in symbols-in particular, in letters. Soon, Jonah was diagnosed with dyslexia and enrolled in special ed, and his mother, getting her graduate degree in education, was losing sleep worrying about the dire fate of smart, angry kids who never learned to read.

Jonah felt trapped in school, isolated among strange children who could look at the blackboard and understand it. He looked forward to Saturdays, when he took a pottery class. The clay absorbed his anger, his desire for freedom, and his intelligence: he realized he could make long spindly legs, and that if he built a giant monster around the finished legs, the clay would contract and make the structure surprisingly secure, standing...