The Nature of Clickbait

I have become a huge fan of the satirical website ClickHole (http://www.clickhole.com/), which is run by the Onion.  Essentially, is a parody of all the clickbait taglines that exist on places such as BuzzFeed and Cracked.  ClickHole features lists such as "7 Sloths Who Are Almost Too Adorable to Throw Off the Top of The Chrysler Building" and quizzes such as "Are you a widow?"  Honestly, my Facebook page has mostly becoming sharing ClickHole articles to get back at my friends who post dumb BuzzFeed articles.

But this has got me thinking about the nature of "clickbait" and why it exists to begin with.  I think it is partially caused by two aspects of the Web 2.0 .  First, we have all shifted from simple users of information to produsers of information (Bruns, 2007), a cringe-worthy term that suggest people both consumer and create content in Web 2.0.   Second, one of the main functional building blocks of social media is sharing (Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, & Silvestre, 2011).  We all share content with each other via platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Thus, we are both creating and sharing more content than ever before.  How is a piece of information supposed to break through the crowd to reach an audience?  An attention grabbing headline will certainly help.   A headline like "4 things Hillary Clinton doesn't want you to know" is certainly more attention grabbing than "Hillary Clinton's Past."  So it is easy to see why clickbait it exists: it is an easy way to get something looked at in a cast sea of other articles.  And when ad revenue is still the main source of revenue for a website, views become more important than quality.

So what do you think? Is there more to this? Some aspect of clickbait I have missed? Are they ways to get rid of clickbait (e.g., subscription revenue models)?  Is clickbait even a bad thing? Let me know what you think.

And since I'm writing this on Independence Day, I'll leave you with a story about a true patriot:  http://www.clickhole.com/article/true-patriot-meet-man-who-keeps-extra-pillow-his-h-1448

References

Bruns, A. (2007). Beyond difference: Reconfiguring education for the user-led age.

Kietzmann, J. H., Hermkens, K., McCarthy, I. P., & Silvestre, B. S. (2011). Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media. Business Horizons, 54(3), 241-251. doi: 10.1016/j.bushor.2011.01.005