The Sorry State of Clickbait Research.

I don’t think I’m alone in feeling an almost irrational hatred towards clickbait headlines. It’s not the headlines themselves, per se, more the fact that they exist solely to trick you into clicking through by attempting to trigger your desire for closure rather than a genuine interest in the content. Indeed after being blasted with these headlines for years now I’ve found myself being turned off by the headlines, sometimes even stopping me from reading things that I would have otherwise been interested in. This got me thinking: have we reached the point of diminishing returns for clickbait? As it turns out this might be true but there’s not exactly a lot to go on in terms of research in this field.

You don’t have to go far to find numerous articles which deride and lament the use of clickbait but they have existed since it first began its rise to infamy all those years ago. Certainly there’s a subsection of society which doesn’t appreciate the lowest common denominator style writing which clickbait headlines imply but you get that with almost any new trend, so the question then becomes one of magnitude of the resistance. In order to answer the question of whether or not we’ve reached peak clickbait I did my usual search through various sources but found myself coming up blank, even when I narrowed my view to scholarly sources only. The best I could find was this subject line report from ReturnPath which, whilst it provides some interesting insights, doesn’t speak to the larger question of whether or not we’re starting to get fed up with clickbait as a thing.

Essentially the report states that, for email subject headlines, clickbait style headlines are far less effective than they are on other mediums. Certainly in my experience this is somewhat true, clickbait in my inbox is far less likely to prompt me to click, however it’s a single data point in an area that should be flooded with data. This could be because that data is being held by those who are profiting from it and, by that token, since the main offenders are still engaging in such behaviour you’d hazard a guess that it’s still working from them. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s effectiveness isn’t waning but unless Buzzfeed or another clickbait site decides to open the doors to researchers we likely won’t have an answer for some time.

I must admit that this search was somewhat aspirational in nature; I wanted, nay hoped, that there’d be evidence that clickbait’s demise was just over the horizon. As it turns out while there are rumblings of discontent with the trend there’s very little evidence to suggest it will be going away anytime soon. Hopefully though more companies take a stance ala Facebook’s pushing these kinds of titles further down the chain in favour of more genuine headlines that rely on genuine interest rather than novelty or emotional responses. For now though we’ll just need to  keep applying our own filters to content of this nature.

Although I must admit whatever that one weird secret a stay at home mum has does sound rather intriguing… 😉