And no: of course, I don't mean to say that I don't like clickbaiting . What I don't like is opportunistic, meaningless, and facile clickbaiting , formulated around empty words and a combination of hyperlatives, adjectives, and adverbials with a sensationalist undertone.
And yes: I'm being a bit radical.
But let me explain.
The need to grab attention in a headline, to "hook" the audience, to get them hooked on your content, is not new , far from it. It's a basic principle of communication and information (which I'm not going to theorize about now). Anyone who has studied or practices journalism and/or communications knows this, even phone number library if they have no idea about online marketing, clicks, web traffic, or digital analytics: "I've created an informative piece, and I want it to have an impact."
Competition for information, media, and audiences isn't new either . And it's not new, even if the medium it operates on is the Internet or social media. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt: the excess of information sources and disseminated content fueled by the Internet and social media makes this competition even greater. But that's as far as it goes.
The temptation to generate a sensational, high-impact headline is older than the history of communication . Just ask the editors of the newspaper "El Caso" (if they're still alive). There's no need: just flip through the TV schedule to see how far they'll go to try to snatch a share of the audience. Want milestones? Google "Nieves Herrero Alcasser" and you'll have the answer.
But back to clickbaiting. Wikipedia says that clickbaiting is: “A pejorative term describing web content that aims to generate advertising revenue on the Internet, especially at the expense of the quality or accuracy of the content, relying on sensational headlines to attract a higher click-through rate and encourage the sharing of such material via social media. Clickbait headlines typically aim to exploit the 'curiosity gap,' providing just enough information to provoke curiosity in the reader, but not enough to satisfy their curiosity without clicking on the linked content.”
And this is what I like less and less , I admit. Recently, on a blog that, according to SimilarWeb, has more than 576,000 monthly visits, I read a headline that repeated the prefix "super" three times. Three times "super" in the headline . Why so many superlatives? More and more often, I read headlines with at least two hyper-something adjectives or adverbials. They're starting to make me mentally lazy (and yes, I admitted it at the beginning of this article, maybe "I'm being a bit radical").