Rest In Peace Clickbait
You may soon never have to face the disappointment of clickbait again.
For several years now, one of the defining trends of internet publishing has been “clickbait”, or low-quality content with a clickable, sensationalist headline that lures readers to click, but then doesn’t follow up with much of any substance. It has proliferated our social feeds and has even constituted entire websites, such as Clickhole or Upworthy, which mainly traffic in this kind of content.
The Winds Of Change
But recently there has been a noticeable move away from the clickbait trend, and there is one force at the center of this shift: Facebook. It has long been the case that publishers are somewhat beholden to the social network, which has been driving traffic in large numbers since people stopped visiting homepages to collect their news. Whatever the Facebook algorithm says, goes.
But Facebook has been getting wise to the kind of tricks that publishers use to drive traffic to their sites despite not having quality content to back it up. As Facebook’s goal is to provide the most satisfying experience for their users, prioritizing links in the newsfeed that don’t live up to their promise is not a particularly efficient way to do that. Because of this fact, we’ve now seen Facebook announce two rounds of changes to the algorithm that affect publishers and point to the decline of clickbait.
Quality Over Sensationalism
The first change came last year when Facebook announced that the time a user spends on a page once they click through will help the social network determine if it’s so-called “quality” content that they should show to other users. The more recent change being rolled out right now analyzes the headlines of posted articles to determine if they are quality. As the social network itself advised, it will determine clickbait as follows:
“(1) if the headline withholds information required to understand what the content of the article is; and (2) if the headline exaggerates the article to create misleading expectations for the reader.”
While this may be sending some publishers into a tailspin trying to figure out the best way to optimize their headlines so their content doesn’t get penalized by the algorithm, the social network says that’s not necessary. They plainly stated the the solution was simple: “If a Page stops posting clickbait headlines, their posts will stop being impacted by this change.”
Facebook Demands Change
Though Facebook is undoubtedly a driving force behind this change, the decline of clickbait is also being driven by other factors, too. Content fatigue is becoming more and more of a factor, as internet users have so many more channels, platforms, and places to read content now than ever. This makes users more discerning in what they click on, as they are more aware of the tactics that publishers can use to trick them into clicking on subpar content. This is reflected by the fact that, as Facebook reported in its post, “We’ve heard from people that they specifically want to see fewer stories with clickbait headlines or link titles.”
Out With Old Methods
Another reason that clickbait is tailing off is that the very idea that a website or publisher can simply use eyeballs as a way to raise advertise revenue is declining. Advertisers don’t just want views, they want the views of engaged visitors. With increasing numbers of people using adblockers, getting traffic to your site by any means possible isn’t necessarily an effective way to be attractive to advertisers anymore. Instead, integrating the ad viewing experience into social streams—where it’s not simply a distraction on the page but part of the product, such as a Snapchat custom filter—is much more valuable to advertisers now.
While we can’t know for sure if the era of clickbait is definitively over, we can say that compared to its heyday, things seem to be slowing down.