Governor Vetoes Measure to Raise Salaries of Judges
Here is a headline from a news site yesterday:
This common phrase is widely misused. Is it worth salvaging?
Can you spot the difference in technique?
The first headline is designed to give you all the information you might need, in as few words as possible, to decide whether you want to read the article.
The second headline is designed to obscure the information you would need to decide whether you want to read the article. You must click on the headline to be taken to the article before you know whether it lives up to your expectations.
The first puts the reader in charge. The second is pure manipulation. It is designed to make you do something you might not do if you had enough information to make an informed decision.
We did not pick an especially egregious example of clickbait. We picked an example nearly at random, but one that demonstrates the technique.
The economics of Internet advertising have brought us to this point.
In a printed newspaper, if you are seeing the headline, you are seeing the page with the article and any advertisements the newspaper has sold on that page. If it is the front page, and you are reading one of those newspapers with no ads on the front page, then the articles will probably continue on an inner page. But by that time, the headline itself and the top-down structure of traditional newspaper articles guarantee that you know you want to read that article. Ad revenue depends mostly on one figure, which is the circulation of the newspaper. How well people like the paper as a whole determines how valuable the advertising space inside it is.
In an online news site, ad revenue depends on individual clicks. The more times you make a reader go to a separate page, the more ad space you have to sell, and the more likely the reader is to click by accident on one of the ads and earn you a penny. Some readers may perhaps even deliberately click on an advertisement—but even those readers have more advertisements to click on if you make them go to a separate page.
With profit, and indeed mere survival, at stake, news sites need you to click on that headline. They begin to learn what makes you more likely to click. They take note of which headlines were most effective at bringing in the clicks and try to distill the essence of clickability from them. Detailed statistics show them what works and what leaves readers cold and clickless. Slowly the editors learn how to manipulate readers into doing what the editors want the readers to do. Slowly, by imperceptible stages, their profession changes from journalist to con artist.
Eventually the contrast with the old way is stark. A printed newspaper offers its readers something to read: they can choose how they want to inform themselves, to entertain themselves, to exercise their minds in their own way. A news site manipulates its readers, and must manipulate its readers to survive.
That necessity has grave implications for the whole business of journalism. The most effective way to manipulate readers is with strong emotions; and long experience has proved to the clickbait artists that, once the cute-animal stories of the day are exhausted, the most effective emotion at producing the clicks is anger. Bit by bit, the editors of news sites learn how to make their readers angrier. With click revenues constantly in front of them as a scorecard, they learn how to make us hate each other. They herd us into hostile packs of extremists. They become angry extremists themselves, and their readers applaud them, because the general-interest newspaper that appeals to all sides has been killed by clickbait. Eventually the headlines reach a peak of clickbait perfection: “These Jews Held a Secret Meeting. What They Decided Will Turn Your Stomach.” We didn’t start out to become Nazis: we were forced into it by economics.
What can we do? The dollar is God; it decrees whether news sites live or die. But we, as individuals, control the pennies that make up those dollars. “If we could change ourselves,” as Gandhi said (in a phrase that is usually mutilated into bumper-sticker quotability), “the tendencies in the world would also change.”
The way to change ourselves is wonderfully simple. When we see clickbait, we don’t click on it. The next time you see a headline so intriguing that you can’t possibly resist clicking on it, resist it. Remember that it was crafted specifically to make you do something you would not otherwise do. It is as important to resist this as it is to resist the telephone con man who tells you there’s a warrant out for your arrest or that someone has ordered an iPhone on your Amazon account. Then, once you have passed it by, the sun will shine and the birds will sing, and you will realize that the world is more beautiful without whatever article it was that you didn’t read.
By the way, what was the common phrase that is widely misused? Dr. Boli has no idea. He didn’t take the bait.