They are everywhere and almost unavoidable at this point. 10 Things That Will Make you Live Longer. Everybody wants to live longer so this story is a MUST read, or is it? It will most likely list 10 things with little to no explanation so how do we know if any of it is actually true? We don’t, it’s the classic clickbait article.
A clickbait article is an article that does not deliver on its headline, title or picture; it tricks people into clicking on the article. The reasoning behind all of the nonsense articles with appetizing titles is traffic. Traffic is the driving force for online revenue.
How can you trust an article that doesn’t answer the who, when, how, why of the story. It simply short lists some ideas that can be believable. They just want you to click on the article and then bombard you with ads. With all the clicks coming in from these headlines people are bound to click on the ads surrounding the story.
With Google keywords and search history they know what ads you are more likely to click on. So every person will see ads that are most fitting to them. For example a girl who is constantly buying shoes online will have ads pop up about brand new shoes for a discounted price. This has help for an increase in ad revenue.
A good way to determine what is clickbait and what is an article worth your time can be determined by bounce rate. If a user spends under 15 seconds on an article or does not scroll below the fold, it tells you the article does not have the content to back up the headline.
Clickbait articles have become huge on social media. Facebook has the biggest problem with this. They are flat out on everyone’s news feed now. You can’t go on Facebook without scrolling past a Top 10 fails of all time or You will never believe this.. Facebook is loaded with these articles.
For some of these articles, as soon as you click on it, it shares the article to all of your friends timeline without even asking you. This is how Facebook gets so cluttered with these articles. The reason these articles are so highly effective is because people are gullible. Even I still click on these articles, knowing that it probably is not true and loaded with ads, I still can’t resist the juicy title.
Facebook has realized these clickbait articles are flooding the site and they are trying to reduce the amount of these articles on the timeline. This could pose problems for the news agencies and websites that are relying on the short terms gains of a clickbait article.
We may never be able to get rid of all these clickbait articles so it comes down to your will to resist these hard to resist headlines. I to get sucked into these articles to come out disappointed as well, you just have to think before you click.
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