Cortyn complains about clickbait. Or about clickbait that isn’t.
I wish you a nice, albeit late Wednesday afternoon. With all the stress around the new WoW patch (“Do something about the patch notes!” and “Combat Guild! Combat Guild!”) my column had to be postponed a bit. But all the better, Schuhmann must be off work by now, so I can really get started!
After slowly overcoming the “Uhh, Webedia has changed you so much” wave, there have been comments – especially on Facebook – in recent weeks and months accusing some articles of clickbait. The reasons for this are often quite curious, but I won’t be harsh and will address the topic a bit longer.
Fundamentally, it raises the basic question: What exactly is clickbait?
You could quickly answer here: Anything that is supposed to make a user click on a certain link. But that does not do the matter justice. Because it disregards the “bait” part of the word. A lure. A lure is usually intended to entice someone into a trap, to make them do something that is detrimental to them. If I catch fish with a worm on a hook, I promise them a tasty meal – before they meet their end.
Unlike many other sites – at least that is my view – we are open about our opinions on topics. And pretty much every author here hates “clickbait” as it is practiced by some sites. “He just wanted to buy his mount, but then what happened left him speechless…” or “WoW is dead! Why Legion heralds Blizzard’s downfall” will never be read here. Why? Because it’s cheap. Because an author would feel ashamed to publish something like that.
Sure, sometimes you have to bite the bullet and accept that the old Schuhmann adds a “Hitler” to the title retroactively or talks about “escalating interest” in Overwatch porn. I also sit here in the best “Cpt. Picard Facepalm” gesture in front of the screen, briefly reconsidering my existence, all the important decisions of the last 10 years, and the future of mankind – but I can live with it. After all, the articles deliver what they promise.
Authors are always in a dilemma. I invest time, work, and therefore my boss’s money into my contributions and want them to be read. It would be easy to spice up a single post with clickbait to get a lot of hits. But readers remember that, and I would feel dirty. Finding a good headline that piques curiosity, does not raise false promises, and at the same time does not spoil the entire news – because then I might as well skip the article – is not so easy.
So I ask you to reflect, at least on the part that has been too quick to shout “clickbait!” in recent months, whether that is justified. Personally, I really hate real “clickbait” – when a headline promises something that the article or column doesn’t deliver.
But the purpose of a headline is to make the reader curious about the content, and that is, with all due respect, not “clickbait” – it’s the purpose of a headline.
It honestly feels to me that clickbait is currently a buzzword that people shout whenever they disagree with an article or can’t immediately glean all information from the headline.
But no matter – what do you think about the topic of clickbait? And how do you perceive it – here and on other sites? Let me know in the comments!
Schuhmann says: The title for this complaining Wednesday came about like this:
