““It all amounts to a kind of traffic apocalypse in which it seems all spigots for traffic are being turned off, affecting news organizations big and small, new and old. It hurts outlets heavily reliant on digital advertising but also those that draw revenue from product recommendations and subscriptions. The whole premise of internet publishing — that you could reach audiences far and wide — is starting to crumble. I find it telling that the first anecdote in the story comes from the site Bustle, whose CEO Bryan Goldberg, is someone who has had a lot of very stupid opinions about Web publishing for a very long time. Bustle, because a “handful” of their stories had traffic spikes, hired a whole team of people to try to duplicate the “success” of those stories by “cranking” out similar content. This was their only real strategy, and it was hardly just them. “When a one-off article performed well, we’d zero in on that conceit and write ten more articles on it,” one former staffer at Business Insider told Klein. “And despite that, nothing was hitting.” (Eventually Bustle dissolved its team.)”