We all have seen at least one of these clickbaits (or some variation thereof):
"single mom discovers the meaning of life with a simple trick"
or
"billionaires don't want you to know this secret"
or
"the 10 things that only real survivors do"
or
"you could be sitting on a fortune"
At face value they just seem cheap psychological tricks. They place the reader in the position to wish to belong to a certain group, and they suggest that membership can be attained with the only effort of clicking somewhere.
As a test I wrote:
If you want to be really famous you only have to click here.
but it does not quite stand the comparison.
Am I being too strict in judging my own clickbait, or is there a deeper art to crafting it?
Answer
Clickbait isn't like news where you tell someone the headline so they'll click for more information.
Eggplant linked to lower cancer rates.
Clickbait is where they have to click just to find out the headline.
This one vegetable stops cancer!
There's no nuance in clickbait. Not like medical articles where you use caution about overselling things.
Never tell readers to "click here," because that should be what your headlines makes them think. If you have to tell them, you've lost.
Clickbait creates promises. Sometimes it is about making money, achieving fame, or curing disease. But other times it's a promise of great entertainment.
Whale thanks her rescuer with this incredible move.
The purpose of clickbait is eyeballs (getting the visitor counts up), not to inform, or even to sell. And you do this in part by teasing something someone can't find out via the regular news.
Put this all together and you get lines like:
7 secrets of fame celebrities don't want you to know.
No comments:
Post a Comment