What was the first line of thought when you saw this title? Was it “Yeah! I want to change the way I consume content!” or maybe “Who is this author that thinks that can tell me what to do?” or “Only 5 steps? I am curious to know more about the last one”. Whichever your line of thought was, the fact that you are reading these lines means one thing….You fell for clickbait.
“But what is clickbait?” You may ask if you haven’t been on the internet for the last 10 years. In any case, let me provide you with a definition. Clickbait is the process when a creator uses a text, a thumbnail or a picture to attract attention and make the audience bite the bait and click (hence the name) to a specific link. The main characteristic of clickbait is that the online content usually has little to no connection to the content promoted by the creator (“Clickbait”). The term is widely used in a negative light to describe this type of headline which are sensationalized, and upon clicking, one is redirected to misleading, unsatisfactory, or advertisement-like content (Frampton). According to one of the biggest Social Media platforms in the world, clickbait is defined as a link with a headline that encourages people to click to see more, without telling them much information about what they will see (O’Donovan et al.)
Why does it exist?
One of the first reasons content with clickbait titles exist is economic gain. Money makes the world go round and a lot of the time creators can be compensated for their work by the number of clicks their content receives. A clear example of this model is Youtube, where creators are getting paid for their videos according to the number of views they have. In order to create traction, creators employ certain tactics that help them to attract but at the same time not lie with the content that they have created. To achieve a high number of clicks per piece of content a lot of creators focus the titles of their content on emotions.
According to Apresjan and Orlov clickbait content is usually based on false generalized conversational emotional play associated with a range of typical linguistic structures.(Apresjan and Orlov, Page 4). Furthermore, clickbait is often used as a social engineering technique to promote phishing attacks, illegitimate marketing and the spread of disinformation. This in combination with how prevalent is this practice on social media, made clickbait a practice worth researching. At this point, it should be noted that not all content with a clickbait title or thumbnail is fake news or put the reader in danger. However, clickbait is one of the key characteristics of disinformation. Even though the headline of a clickbait piece of content is not per se credible, in order for it to be effective it has to not be obviously false. In addition, it must work to increase the importance of a piece of content mainly on topics that do not require specialized knowledge and have universal appeal (Marquez, 1980; Chakraborty et al., 2017).
According to Loewenstein click baits take advantage of the cognitive phenomenon known as Curiosity Gap (G. Loewenstein), where the headlines provide forward referencing cues to generate enough curiosity among the consumers of that content such that they become compelled to click on the link to fill the knowledge gap. While these baits may trick the readers into clicking, after the initial click, clickbait usually doesn’t live up to the expectation of the readers and leave them disappointed. Various studies have argued that clickbait is a tool used to enable attention distraction (“Clickbait is a distracting affront to our focus”). The thinking behind that argument is that if readers consume a piece of content as a result of clicking to a clickbait, the attention residue of the same reader will be lower and that will lead to a cognitive overload. As a result, the individual will be deterred from reading a more in-depth piece of content (Chakraborty et al.).
An interesting experiment.
An interesting online experiment was contacted by Apresjan and Orlov. Their hypothesis focused on the fact that clickbait headlines are not uniformly efficient in attracting clicks and that the readers’ reactions to them are altered by a variety of pragmatic factors. Their experiment took place in Toloka, a popular application on the Russian online search engine Yandex (https://toloka.yandex.com/). The creators of this experiment chose ten different pieces of content. The topics of that content focused on broad news topics like Politics, Celebrities/Beauty, Society, Incidents, and Sports. Each of the pieces was represented by an actual headline and a clickbait one. The participants of this experiment were presented with five headlines on two pages and asked to suggest the headlines that they would click if encountered on the web. They could also choose the option “I would not click any”.
Two examples of the kind of titles in the experiment:
- ‘American Airlines plane could not take off because of excess baggage’
The clickbait headline, included in the first set, was.
- ‘American Airlines pilot kicked out 3 women because of excessive weight.
The key findings of the experiment.
The findings of this experiment showed that the main linguistic method used in creating clickbait was false generalized conversational implicature, resulting from disapproval of Gricean maxims of Quantity, Manner, or Relevance, which is cancelled by the content of the article.
As a result, the authors demonstrated that clickbait headlines according to their experiment are based not only on specific lexical items but on larger amounts of text (Anand et al., 2016; Wei and Wan, 2017; Chakraborty et al., 2016; Potthast et al., 2016). Furthermore, Apresjan and Orlov showed based on their dataset that the curiosity gap is based on a contradiction between the false expectations introduced by the linguistic methods and the background knowledge or expectations of the readers. Finally, they examined the effectiveness of clickbait and showed that for a piece of content to attract clicks, it has to satisfy certain pragmatic requirements.
Of course, this specific experiment was based on data on the Russian language. Furthermore, the authors of this article underlined the fact that their experiment was focused on the pragmatic view of specific linguistic structures, however, they expect that the actual media usage of clickbait content vs. honest one might be culturally determined.
Conclusion.
The sensationalistic and vague style of headline creation, made famous by sites like BuzzFeed and 5mins crafts (“This Man Bought his Daughter an Ice Cream. What Happened Next Will Shock You”), created a style of content promotion that enraptured the curiosity of readers across the globe. Even though one of the first things that come to our mind when we hear the word clickbait is the World Wide Web, this process is not a new phenomenon. It has been around since the creation of print journalism. Nevertheless, the rapid swift of the kind of content and the fact that people consume content more than ever brings the “art” of clickbait to a significant place in academia. From dangerous crafts on the internet that present something unachievable as easy, to political comments focused on the shock and negative reaction of the consumer of the content, clickbait can take many forms.
References
Apresjan, Valentina, and Alexander Orlov. “Pragmatic mechanisms of manipulation in Russian online media: How clickbait works (or does not).” Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 195, no. 2022, 2022, pp. 91-108, https://libkey.io/libraries/587/articles/519331629/full-text-file.
Chakraborty, Abhijnan, et al. “Stop Clickbait: Detecting and Preventing Clickbaits in Online News Media.” International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, 2016. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7752207.
“Clickbait.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickbait. Accessed 22 October 2022.
““Click bait is a distracting affront to our focus.” YouTube, 8 March 2014, http://nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/11/24/you-wont-believe-whatthese-people-say-about-click-bait/click-bait-is-a-distracting-affrontto-our-focus. Accessed 22 October 2022.
DataTilsynet. “Google Analytics.” Datatilsynet, https://www.datatilsynet.dk/english/google-analytics. Accessed 18 October 2022.
Frampton, Ben. “Clickbait: The changing face of online journalism.” BBC, 14 September 2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-34213693. Accessed 22 October 2022.
. Loewenstein, G. “The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation.” Psychological bulletin, vol. 116, 1994.
O’Donovan, Caroline, et al. “What is clickbait? | Nieman Journalism Lab.” Nieman Lab, 25 August 2014, https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/08/what-is-clickbait/. Accessed 22 October 2022.
Swaney, Sara. “Analytics Tools & Solutions for Your Business – Google Analytics.” Google Marketing Platform, https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/. Accessed 18 October 2022.