I spends quite a bit of time on the internet, frequenting many news and opinion sites. Most of these are in a magazine format where the home page has a whole lot of headlines that contain links to articles. Since these sites depend upon traffic to get advertising revenues, they necessarily try to use headers to get readers curious and thus lure readers to click on the link and read the article. That is fine, as long as the header provides some information that gives me a reasonable expectation of what the article contains. But not all of them do. Over time, I have developed a kind of filtering reflex that tells me whether I should click or not.
In general, I tend to avoid links that contain short cryptic headers that do not give any clue as to what the article contains. In the early days of the internet, there used to be a very popular website that I frequented that would aggregate news items but the headers were almost all of that nature and provided little or no clue. I would get irritated to find that the link did not lead to anything I was interested in so I stopped frequenting that site altogether.
There are the inevitable photos on the borders of pages with captions that are obviously clickbait to ad-intensive sites (usually photographs), hinting that it will reveal some embarrassing information about some celebrity, such those who have secret partners other than their public ones, or photos of celebrities from days gone by who were known for their good looks but have grown old, or that promise to reveal some shocking fact about that celebrity. Then there are the ones that tout miracle foods, magical diets, body cleansers, and other supposed secrets to good health and longevity. Those are annoying but are obviously junk and thus easily ignored.
The clickbait headers that really annoy me are those that link to genuine articles in reputable sites that have titles about topics that I might well be interested in reading but annoy me by implying that the author of the piece knows something about my state of knowledge on the topic. These titles are variations of the form “What you didn’t know about [topic].”
A specific example is “Why You Should Care About Napoleon More Than You Do” (referring to the recent film about the French historical figure). How do they know how much I already care?
Another example is “Everything You Think You Know About Methane is Wrong”. Really? Everything? Even things like the chemical formula of the gas? I’m pretty sure I remember that correctly from my chemistry class.
Another one is “The best television you never watched in 2023”. How do they know what I did or did not watch?
I get so irritated by these kinds of titles that I do not click on the link. I might well wanted to read the articles if they had been worded differently and not so insultingly, such as “Why Napoleon is worth watching if you do not care about him”. Or “Some surprising facts about methane”. Or “Some good but little known television shows in 2023”.
I am pretty sure that I am not alone in finding such titles off-putting. But the fact that they are so common suggests that they work, that many people do not get turned off by them and do indeed click on them.
“This man saw an annoying article header — when he read it anyway, his face turned pale!”
“Most Annoying Article Headers of 2023 (#5 will shock you!)”
“This man expected a leopard to eat his neighbor’s face — and then this happened!”
“Someone did something mundane and ordinary — find out what happened next!”
CNN still maintains a site, lite.cnn.com that has news articles in text only, no pictures and no ads. I think it is intended for people who use text-to-speech interpreters. I love it.
Once in a while, an article there will be heavily dependent on a picture or pictures and I will have to click over to the main CNN site. I always find it extremely annoying.
The whole banner ad economy is slowly collapsing -- clickbaiting is just a symptom. Where it will get interesting is if there is no actual collapse, but rather and endless downward spiral into more and more garbage. The garbage will (already is) be mostly written by AIs so there won’t be any costs to squeeze out on the production side.
There are ad models that appear to be working in the sense of “valuable for the advertiser” mostly influencer-based (therefore targeted to an audience) or embedded in content by the content creators. It’ll be interesting to see if there is a backlash or not.
I watch Popok’s Legal AF on youtube and his network embeds ads in the content, read by Popok, so google’s AI often interrupts Popok’s ad with ads of its own, and Popok’s ad continues when google’s does. When will marketers learn that shitting up content does not work?
Raging Bee@#1:
I’d actually click on some of those!
The ones that drive me nuts are ${forgettable starlet} drops jaws in her party dress that reveals too much. Which links to some instagram page.
Advertisers advertising influencers’ ads -- we have almost reached rock bottom.
I seem to recall being taught the pyramid structure to an article, where it’s Headline -- what’s the subject, subheader -- basic introduction, main body -- actual details of what’s happening.
Now, it’s like Headline -- reason to click so you’ll see the ads, subheader -- reason to scroll down to load the second ad block, main body -- reason to comment and share with your friends so they can see the ads too.
The thing that really annoys me is the “sponsored content”, i.e. things that look like genuine articles, except that half way through you start wondering why they keep mentioning how great that one particular bank is.
… I tend to avoid links that contain short cryptic headers that do not give any clue as to what the article contains.
Me too -- but I often feel compelled to click on half-vague headlines to see, e.g., which [$ politician] has switched positions on what [$ issue].
I suspect our esteemed host, among many others, has tried & abandoned rawstory.com precisely because of their pushing that sort of carnival barkery (among numerous other failures). Owing to an arguably anxious/neurotic urgency to see news now!!!, I still scan their front page several times a day -- can anyone here suggest a better-run but equally rapid aggregator?
Headlines, schmedlines. I always enjoy a good typo. For example, the opening sentence of Mano’s post above is much more humorous if you say it in your head with a Popeye voice.
@7: “I Mano Singham what I Yam”?
@3 Marcus Ranum: The online ad economy may collapse at some point but over the short term it looks good. Companies are shifting ads away from cable to online. Total cable viewership is going down and subscription services are slicing the market into thinner and thinner bits.
Online ads have piles of problems but a lot of it feels like a new market working out issues. So the companies that want to advertise are willing to overlook things.
#8 son
“I spends quite a bit of time on the internet, frequenting many news and opinion sites.”
“Argumentative person sees semi-clever comment vanish, turns red!”
Yes, I too find them everywhere.
For example, “Why Are Critics Dismissing the Movie Masterpiece of 2023?”.
Source: I just clicked on https://slate.com/
On the positive side, the URL for it when I hover the mouse is:
https://slate.com/culture/2023/12/may-december-natalie-portman-julianne-moore-best-movies-2023.html
So I get clues as to what it may be, were I familiar with movies.
But the only way to find out what movie that might be is to either click on the link or to do a search based on the parameters provided, which might take longer.
So, my psychological reactance kicks in.
Fuck’em, I think.
Principle of the thing.
Same goes for ‘bait’n switch’ post titles, which are the more generic form of this phenomenon.
Anyway, not a prob.
“fool me once, shame on you…”
I was recently enlightened about an insidious form of enshittification in Youtube videos. I was already aware of the thing happening, but hadn’t really thought through why it might be happening. When I found out, it was low-level infuriating in the same way these deceptive headlines are.
Here’s how it works: you click on a video talking about a subject you’re interested in. It is produced by a channel you’re familiar with, possibly, and in any case is clearly the work of people who know what they’re talking about. On its face the content is good quality and engaging, but then, part way through and bafflingly, the presenter mispronounces a word. “Grammar Nazi” I hear you cry (with some justification in my case, I’ll grant), but no, it’s not that. It’s the egregious mispronunciation of a word you’d absolutely expect this presenter to know perfectly well how to pronounce, given their knowledge of the subject. How does one respond in such a case? Obviously, given how Youtube works, you go the comment section and type out a comment correcting them.
And that’s what they want you to do. They set a trap, and you fell for it like the fascist that you are. Ellie Littlechild at WhatCulture.com knows perfectly well that Star Trek 4 is called “The Voyage Home” not “A Voyage Home”. Ryan Arey at Screencrush isn’t the kind of moron who’d look at the word “Dalek” and say “Daylek”… they’re saying those things, making those ridiculous mistakes to drive up engagement. More comments = better placement in the algorithm.
Now I understand what they’re doing and why it’s easy to ignore, but good grief it’s cynical and shit, isn’t it?
sonofrojblake, nope. You think you understand, but it’s bullshit. Paranoia.
Also, by the time you’re looking at the content, you’ve actually clicked on the article header, but that’s by the bye.
Headers have been annoying for a long time. From a song from 2002:
“The reservoirs are colder / And deeper than you think” / Well stop, wait a minute Mr Spokesman / You don’t know what I think
Is your lake about / (hmm now let’s see) / A hundred miles deep / And ninety below?
And is it home to sharks?
If we’re going to talk about enshitification, we can’t ignore Amazon’s recent announcement that Prime will include ads starting in a few weeks. Remember, this is a service people pay for. Of course, now Amazon is giving you the freedom to pay even more to avoid commercials, for the low-low price of $3 extra per month (or whatever it is). I never found Prime video to be a particularly good deal and this just makes it worse. Apparently, Bezos must need more cash to build another one of his giant outer space penis rockets.
Check out the latest issue of Mother Jones magazine. The theme is oligarchy. Some excellent material in there.
Hasn’t Netflix’s cheapest option been ad-supported for a while? In my mind, Prime, Disney+ and the rest are all “me-too” versions of Netflix. (Cue somone popping up to tell me there was something like Netflix before Netflix, which I’m fine with -- purely in my mind they’re the original and best, but I wouldn’t be surprised though to find out that THEY were a “me-too” once too.)
A similar source of annoyance is the “Why do we…” headline, where the ellipsis is very often filled with something I don’t do -- and equally often, something the writer implicitly or explicitly tells us they don’t do, and no-one else should either.
Here’s one that annoys me:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/31/family-of-uk-mother-and-son-killed-in-alps-avalanche-beyond-heartbroken
“Family of UK mother and son killed in Alps avalanche ‘beyond heartbroken’”
(Almost as bad as “very unique”)
—
Yes, I know that to most mugs, it’s supposed to act as a superlative.
And they don’t get how that grates.
[and yes, since I’m in my cups, I admit that I get that it’s supposed to be emotional rather than semantic content. But that could be done without the stupidity of mangling the meaning of stuff]
[OK, technically, not a superlative, rather an intensifier]