Trust Me, I’m Lying summary

All blogs, big or small, are businesses. And like all businesses, a blog’s main goal is to make money. They primarily do this by selling advertising space.

Each blog sells advertising space in different ways, but one common way is “per impression” pricing – a fee the advertiser pays a blog for each time someone opens a blog page with their ad on it.

You may have noticed that most blogs produce multiple posts a day. This is because the more content there is, the longer the reader usually browses, which in turn generates more ad impressions and more revenue for the blog.

Additionally, while traditional news media are restricted by time or size limitations – like newspaper word counts or one-hour-long TV news programs – there is no limit to how much content a blog can publish.

Just as any business needs customers, blogs need web traffic: people to browse and read their content. In fact, they need lots of it, since the advertising fees they charge are directly related to the traffic they get.

Clearly, blogs want to get as many visitors as possible. To do that, they rely on a variety of methods to snag people’s attention.

Have you ever read a story online that made you angry? This was probably not a coincidence. Blogs often try to pique our emotions to get us more involved.

For example, they know that when we see a story about an injustice, like a child getting kidnapped, we get angry. That anger then spurs us to interact with the story, either by sharing it with others or by posting our thoughts in its comments section. This then creates buzz around the story, generating more ad revenues for the blog.

One time or another, you’ve probably encountered an article on a blog with the words “UPDATE” or “CORRECTION” in its title. As you can probably guess, this means the article you’re reading has been changed from its original version.

This change was most likely made because the blogger who first published the story got something wrong or presented the story while it was still developing.

A news story can affect everything from stock market prices to presidential elections. It’s no surprise, then, that blogs wield enormous power in shaping society.  

For a political example, look no further than Tim Pawlenty. Pawlenty was the governor of Minnesota when political blog Politico started speculating he would run for president – even before he’d expressed any intention to do so.

History has shown that we enjoy watching other people get publicly punished, humiliated or torn down. Just look at our ancestors’ love for witch trials, guillotine executions and gladiatorial battles.

These “degradation ceremonies,” as anthropologists call them, allow the public to single out and denounce one of its members – simply because we need a scapegoat to take our anger out on.