Inside the Media’s Traffic Apocalypse

Last spring, the entertainment and lifestyle website Bustle saw huge spikes in traffic for a handful of stories — between 150,000 and 300,000 search views each, compared to the usual 1,000 or less. Bustle had long struggled to place high in SEO rankings or land on the Google News module, but recent months had been particularly brutal, and the spikes prompted emergency meetings to figure out how to keep them going. “Bryan Goldberg made it a top priority of the company to see if they could duplicate that success,” said a former staffer, referring to Bustle’s CEO. Goldberg made a few new hires and even pulled people from other teams to create a new team that would help crank out similar content.