Have you ever met the perfect word? It’s a word that describes something you can’t otherwise explain, or something you take a long time to describe but never feel you did a good job. For me, satisfaction has recently arrived when I learned the term clickbait.
It’s such an awesome term!
Mostly on Facebook, I deplored the kind of headlines that read:
You’ll never guess what she wore to the prom!
Such a headline would be accompanied by some titillating image.
When you click, of course, you get nothing but ads, maybe a few pop-up windows. Every link seems to open in its own window, with more and more ads.
The clickbait is a tease. It’s not designed to expand your knowledge or even entertain you. The clickbait’s purpose is to pimp clicks.
Other great clickbait headlines:
You won’t believe your eyes! This is the most amazing thing!
What this little girl said about her soldier dad is priceless.
This mom tells the school board what everyone is thinking.
If you think this is odd, wait until you see what happened next!
Why is it so important for the clickbait to work?
Because page-hits amount to money in the online world. If you can get 50,000 people to visit your web site, advertisers reward you greatly. So the idea is to hype up something that would otherwise be uninteresting, and get people to click, click, click!
Another, more nefarious reason: To get you to sign up for something you might not otherwise want. You get on a mailing list. Such actions may expose your online account to malware or porn. Yes, it’s my old nemesis, human engineering again. After all, which would you rather click on:
Sign up for annoying spam
Or:
Eight things you must have to survive the coming economic collapse
In the big picture, I believe clickbaiting is a phase. Sensationalist headlines once sold a lot of newspapers — way, way back in the heydey of yellow journalism. But today, even the tabloids shy away from the shocking, “You must open this issue or the puppy will die” type of headlines. That’s because, after a while, they fail to work.
A human being can only handle so much. At a saturation point, people become desensitized. Eventually, overstimulus has no impact. In some cases, it actually becomes annoying.
So I predict that the clickbait phase will pass. Not before going over the top, of course.
Now hurry up and buy more of my books and you’ll learn about Obama’s secret plans for America!
I’ve fell for it many times. I panic trying to get the ads off, thinking if my Mum walks up behind me right now she’ll think I’ve got a gambling, alcohol and pornography addiction! 🙂
Comment by The Gnome Whisperer — May 26, 2014 @ 5:00 am
My least favorite clickbaits are my last example. Things like, “Five things you can’t be without during the next natural disaster.”
So you click on the link, and you see a video of a guy drawing with dry erase markers. It’s pretty interesting to watch, but after about five minutes you realize that the guy has said nothing. He just keeps teasing. And if you watch until the end, as I did once (only once), you learn that to get the five things, you need to buy his $30 eBook. That really makes me smolder.
Comment by admin — May 26, 2014 @ 6:31 am
Similarly, when you’re looking to download something and there’s 6 download buttons with 5 of them being advertisements that take you somewhere else, that gets pretty annoying.
Comment by gamerguy473 — May 26, 2014 @ 10:13 am
Gawd. I’ve fallen for that one too many times, GamerGuy. I installed some ZIP packager and I’m forraging around in the thing going, “Where the heck is the file I wanted?”
Took me a while to remove the stupid software as well.
Not to mention that it changed my browser’s home page and search preferences.
Ugh.
Comment by admin — May 26, 2014 @ 10:17 am