Enough with the Clickbait Already

Clickbait is everywhere, in advertising and journalism alike.

You’ve seen the headlines. “He Thought It Was Bigfoot’s Skull, but Experts Told Him THIS.” Turns out, the guy found a rock.

“Gut Doctor Begs America, ‘Throw Out This Vegetable.’” You may have seen that ad in the “Sponsored Content” section of various news sites. What vegetable are we supposed to throw out? Nobody knows. The company that produced these adds sells probiotic capsules but won’t tell you what vegetable you’re supposed to stop eating.

Headlines are supposed to grab a reader’s attention. A good headline is designed to pique interest and curiosity, but clickbait is manipulative, dishonest, sensationalist, or all three. Sometimes the content on the other side of the link is a shaggy-dog story (a long, trivial narrative culminating in an anticlimax). Other times, the headline-content combo is a blatant bait-and-switch operation, a form of advertising fraud that long precedes the Internet.

The problems with clickbait are threefold. First, everyone who clicks your link will be annoyed. Second, they won’t want to click on any more of your links. If your entire purpose is getting a click and nothing else, well, but good luck getting anywhere with that strategy. You certainly won’t grow a business that way. Third, clickbait makes the general pubic suspicious of advertisers and journalists in general. If they think an ad looks clickbaity, they may resist clicking on it when they otherwise might have.

The Onion launched a satirical website called Clickhole that mocks clickbait in the media business. Its team uploaded a video to YouTube with the following headline: “This Stick Of Butter Is Left Out At Room Temperature; You Won’t Believe What Happens Next.” Spoiler alert: the butter slowly softens over a three-hour period.

Web browsers now have clickbait-detection apps, and Twitter actively filters this kind of content. The Facebook group “Stop Clickbait” has an ingenious solution. It closes the curiosity gap by having its users read clickbait articles so you don’t have to and answering the question asked in the headline. The results are often amusing.

Not every headline designed to get a reader to click counts as clickbait, of course. If your content delivers on your headline, you’re good. But if you’re an advertiser or journalist who deliberately engages in this sort of behavior, expect to be hated, mocked, and resisted.