Clickbait
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This page on clickbait written by a local mom will change your life!
Clickbait refers to any sort of underhanded, style over substance tactic used by webpages to garner more page visits, often on social media websites. This can be accomplished a number of different ways, from posting emotionally pleasing but intellectually vacuous material, presenting an incomplete news article or video with a possibly deceptive title, using emotional appeals such as "You won't believe what happens when...", presenting sexually suggestive imagery, posting a quiz to find out "Which _______ character are you?" (or other inane online quizzes whose only purpose is to stroke the quiz taker's ego), or using provocative pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, or outright hoaxes. With the power of argumentum ad populum, social media becomes a very effective propagator of such nonsensical ideas.[1] In addition, clickbait sites often re-hash trendy videos whose fame was over years ago.[2]
Quality websites should value engagement with readers instead of empty attention-grabbing, because it is more respectful to readers and increases business value for the brand of a website.[3] In contrast, clickbait makes a lot of quick money in the short term while failing to build up a reputable brand in the long term. If a headline contains a word like "surprising", "amazing", or "shocking" - you won't be surprised, amazed or shocked by the contents of the article.
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[edit] Common examples
The term is used in an adjective and derogatory form to describe websites which participate in clickbaitery.
[edit] News
These websites ostensibly serve as general news websites with coverage of both political events and entertainment as well, albeit modeled after tabloids (and even putting established tabloids like Daily Mail and National Enquirer to shame in the art of attracting suckers). Often, their headlines are politically slanted depending on the sites' target audiences (which are noted in the following list) and misleading. These websites intend to have their content shared en masse on social media sites; this is how politically biased or blatantly false information spreads rapidly on the Internet while more sober, reality-based information is obscured.
Most websites that generate clickbait were founded during the Web 2.0 era, with the rise of social media and user-generated content that increased incentive to create compelling-yet-shallow material for web consumption. However, the right-wing Drudge Report news aggregator, founded in 1998, was clickbait before clickbait was even a word. In 2005, the Huffington Post was launched as a left-wing competitor to Drudge. (In fact, Andrew Breitbart got his start working for both sites before founding his own eponymous news/commentary website. While Breitbart.com has had its share of credibility issues, in all fairness it does not rely on clickbait-style headlines/content as much as other sites listed here.)
Although the conservative Daily Caller and liberal Huffington Post do have more sober, show-don't-pander headlines for its articles, those sites are guilty of using emotional manipulation to attract traffic. Both websites often post galleries of NSFW (though not exactly pornographic) photos of women that are filed under the entertainment sections yet often promoted on the front page. Additionally, Daily Caller has sometimes used explicitly racially charged headlines. One story was once titled "Black males are viciously beating people at random at the University of Illinois" before being retitled to the more neutral "Gang Of Men Is Viciously Beating People At Random At The University Of Illinois".[4]
Other websites that are guilty of using clickbait headlines to pay the bills:
- The Blaze (conservative)
- Buzzfeed (liberal)
- Buzzpo (a conservative knockoff of Buzzfeed)
- Conservative Tribune[5]
- Daily Signal (conservative)[6]
- The Federalist Papers (conservative, not to be confused with the also conservative but with articles with more serious titles and higher reading level, TheFederalist.org)
- Headline Politics (conservative)
- Independent Journal Review (conservative)
- Newsmax (conservative)
- The Political Insider (conservative)
- Salon.com (liberal)[7]
- Tea Party News Network[8]
- Time: Sadly, even the website for a once-great weekly news magazine has sunken to using clickbait to sustain its website while putting its regular, in-depth magazine content behind a paywall.[9]
- Upworthy (liberal)
- The Weather Channel, too? Still shows some weather on the front page, at least. Much of the rest is (often partnered) clickbait only tangentially related to climate or weather.
- Western Journalism Center[wp] (conservative)
- Young Conservatives[11]
[edit] Entertainment
Even in reporting lighter topics like music, TV, sports, etc., readers would like to see ideas conveyed in headlines instead of lured by vague, uncertain headlines. Websites that too often commit the latter include:
[edit] Humor
- Clickhole.com - the Onion's parody of a clickbait website.
- Cracked.com
[edit] Quackery/woo/conspiracy theories
[edit] Science (unfortunately)
[edit] Alternate uses
In the Gamergate movement, the word "clickbait" has a somewhat different meaning. A formal definition hasn't yet been supplied, but would seem to be something like "any article, regardless of the headline, that criticizes sexism in gaming or among gamers".[14] Or everything published by Gawker. It is presumed that the people writing the "clickbait" articles don't actually care about the subjects they're writing about.
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Data Mining Reveals How Conspiracy Theories Emerge on Facebook. MIT Technology Review: March 18, 2014.
- ↑ My Top Six Reasons for Going All-Out Against Clickbait, Ridiculous List Articles and Other Viral DRECK – And #4 Will Pucker Your Sphincter!. Holes in the Foam. June 26, 2014.
- ↑ Henshaw, Robb. "Content Promotion vs. Clickbait: How to Avoid Destroying Trust & Traffic." Relevance.com: September 29, 2014.
- ↑ Twitter post on Oct. 17, then the article as of Oct. 18, 2014 via Wayback Machine
- ↑ Example: Officer Wilson Was Caught Doing THIS to a Black Kid Just Before Shooting Mike Brown (ironically, the URL gives away the ending because the path reads in part, "wilson-saves-baby-before-shooting")
- ↑ Dish Just Replaced Fox News With This Channel (Well, why not NAME the channel?)
- ↑ Without any sense of irony, Salon published this article in November 2014, "The REAL reason to stop talking about “clickbait”. Also, a Salon contributor accused Salon of turning his article into worthless clickbait in How Salon.com Rewrote My Headline and Turned Me Into an Internet Troll.
- ↑ Example: Could This BOMBSHELL News About Bill Clinton Derail the ‘Ready for Hillary’ Campaign? Well, why not just tell us what it is? And following Betteridge's law, the answer might as well be...no, becuase TPNN and other right wing blogs are jumping to wild conclusions based on this Smoking Gun article "Billionaire Sex Offender's Phone Book Contained E-Mail Addresses, 21 Phone Numbers For Bill Clinton" that merely says, "According to court records, Clinton “frequently flew” with Epstein aboard the investor’s private jet from 2002 to 2005, the year news of the police investigation of Epstein was first reported...lawyers for the women floated the possibility of subpoenaing Clinton since he “might well be a source of relevant information” about Epstein’s activities." Also, Clinton has disassociated with Epstein since Epstein's conviction.
- ↑ Example: Leonard Nimoy’s Final Tweet Will Make You Cry
- ↑ Google search, "you won't believe" site:WesternJournalism.com
- ↑ Internet Archive capture from Jan. 16, 2015 - a LOT of examples there.
- ↑ Example title: "Here's the Ridiculous Amount of Money "Kim Kardashian: Hollywood" Actually Made." Better title would've told the reader the fact, instead of lured the reader into clicking.
- ↑ While most headlines on that site are fairly straightforward, some headlines are more vague but may be intended as snark. For example, "Carson Palmer Leaves Game With Knee Injury" vs. "Stay There, Brock Osweiler; Peyton's Got This" or "Kirk Cameron Did What Now?"
- ↑ https://archive.today/T3ykb Gamergate wiki defining clickbait as "an article being only tangentially related to video games and the piece being used to push a political agenda."