Chasing the Dress Into the Viral Traffic Abyss

Gawker Media’s Nolita office, where the blogging conglomerate was located until the summer of 2015, was always dank and weird: a loft-style brick room in an old building on Elizabeth Street, with lighting so dim it was probably reportable to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. I started working there in 2014, as a culture editor for the women’s site Jezebel, and although I adapted to the speed of blogging culture, I could never really get over the office. It was so dark that our computer screens emitted more light than the ceilings, which hung from the ceiling with the aplomb of an early 20th century pub, and had the unnecessary brown glow of tiny Edison bulbs. Those of us who couldn’t afford desk lamps, which was most important, clattered in the dark past the long rows of tables where staff from all six locations, about a hundred of us, sat side by side. We communicated almost exclusively via Internet chat – even with colleagues sitting a foot apart – although the room would often erupt in laughter over jokes known only to those in their particular Slack channel. Everyone had gotten used to it, but otherwise the office was so quiet, like a wacky library, that it was almost surprising if someone spoke to you out loud.

Except on February 26, 2015, when a viral outfit known as “The Dress” upended the silence of the office and, likely, the trajectory of the media itself.

It may be difficult to remember this era in American culture, but 2015 was another world: Obama was president, Tumblr was the favorite social platform for young people and fan fiction writers, and the country was under the spell of “Uptown Funk,” the song by Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars. More importantly, BuzzFeed was hugely popular, having tapped into millennial identity through its judicious use of absurd quizzes and meme-exploring video concepts. On February 26, when a British woman posted a photo of a dress on Tumblr that caused an optical illusion: was it black and blue, or white and gold? — she emailed it to a Buzzfeed staffer, who wrote an article that garnered more than 16 million views.

BuzzFeed was an enemy of Gawker Media — both for its content, which we generally considered tasteless and cloying, and for its ability to generate the kind of web traffic that could, at least in those days, sustain a business. At the head of the row of tables where we sat was a series of giant screens we called the “Big Board” that projected real-time statistics from Chartbeat, the data company websites used at the time to track traffic figures. That afternoon, the editor-in-chief of Gawker Media shouted into the cold silence, “Everyone needs to blog The Dress!” » The energy was frenetic, almost caricatured. Staff members began speaking out loud; each site started thinking about an angle that would make sense for their respective publications. (Jalopnik, Gawker Media’s auto site, was exempt.)

The Big Board became somewhat known for its emphasis on web traffic, alongside a monthly program in which writers with the most traffic stories received a bonus on top of their salary. In some media, they were the symbol of mercenary incentives aimed at increasing web traffic and therefore advertising sales; among other things, they were indicative of the rapid decline of the media. “You only care about traffic,” an older New York Times reporter I barely knew once said to me, implying that I wasn’t a real journalist like him. Jezebel staffers were often targets of this type of condescension, as our Gawker parentage, opinionated voices, and unrepentant femininity irritated the more established in the Ivory Tower. We cared a lot about journalism, we also blogged sometimes. But none of us, neither Gawker Media’s various sites nor the Times, were immune to the extent to which search engine optimization (SEO)—the tailoring of news and headlines to rise to the top of Google’s search engine, driving traffic to media sites—would upend our lives.

Jezebel’s contribution to the discourse was just one, by contributor Mark Shrayber, who captioned his blog, “Do you know what color this dress is? ‘FUCKING UGLY’.” The fact that whoever edited this didn’t remove the scare quotes (was it me? I don’t remember) is indicative of the nature of blogging for traffic: when speed is the key, AP style takes a backseat. But the content of his message is revealing. “I’ve been looking at this dress for about ten minutes now, waiting for it to change color before my eyes so I can write this post my editor texted me about and there are only two things I can come up with: 1. The color story on this dress is completely fucked up. 2. The real color of the dress is “fucking ugly.”

Shrayber’s title was generally irreverent, and we probably weren’t thinking about SEO at the time — swear words weren’t great for search, but I certainly imagine people Googling “ugly dress.” We were visibly exhausted by the banality of the subject and aware that the optical illusion was both extremely stupid and somewhat fascinating. (WIRED would later report that The Dress phenomenon had prompted neuroscientists to further study how visual processing affects perception of reality, leading to a breakthrough in how the brain disambiguates lighting.)

But The Dress was a viral phenomenon in which SEO proved that traffic could be optimized by focusing on the silliest memes, leading media outlets to cut down at least some of their content to feed the algorithm. A few years after The Dress, I became editor-in-chief of Jezebel; I remember a confusing traffic meeting in which I was both criticized and pressured to increase our minimum coverage on the Kardashians, a constant source of SEO-generated clicks. Gawker Media was then decimated; Jezebel’s new office was very well lit and located in Times Square.

The SEOification of media has led to the moment when an institution as revered as the New York Times even discovered blogs, increasing its volume of aggregated news. The entire media was consumed by SEO games in the 2020s, fueling research to generate numbers for advertisers who were still learning that they could simply reach audiences directly on social media. And yet Google, after spending a decade luring media companies into this aggregation trap, has begun to bypass the media altogether, aggregating credible journalism into its AI Overview toolkit. This has significantly reduced traffic to media sites, according to a recent Pew Research Center report, which found that only a third of Google searches with AI Overview led to a click through to a source site. It’s not The Dress’s fault, but The Dress was a dark harbinger of the future of digital publishing.

By the way, the correct answer was black and blue.