My Adventures In Clickbait

For a while now, I’ve been ruminating on the problem of clickbait and how it has metastasized from celebrity news (which is annoying, but tolerable) to “real” news. We’re all used to sites using clickbait to direct our attention to Kim Kardashian or heartwarming stories about kittens, but I hadn’t really seen many pieces noting how thoroughly the practice had moved into politics and was actually breaking our national debate.

Last Sunday, I dashed off a piece about it. I’ve been writing ruminations about the election for my friends on Facebook for the past five months. A couple months ago, I moved them to Medium because it allowed me to embed links and images.

To prove my point, I gave the piece an incredibly incendiary title: “You Won’t Believe What Hillary Ordered the DNC to do to Bernie’s Brother.” I had a couple friends and my wife read it to make sure I didn’t say anything unusually stupid and posted it live on Sunday night.

What Happened Next May Shock You!

Sorry, once you get started, it’s hard to stop.

Two things happened after I posted it. They’re related and I want to discuss them with the (I’m sure) much smaller group of people who will read this piece:

1. A number of people sharply critiqued the piece and me for failing to recognize that alternative media has to go to such lengths to be heard in an information landscape owned by massive monopolistic media corporations. Worse, the piece only criticized alternative media and voices, doing anything they can to be heard, and completely ignored the manipulations regularly perpetrated by mass media.
2. Holy SHITBALLZ! A lot of people clicked on that piece.

I’ll take the second part first. Here’s an image of the stats of all the pieces I’ve posted on Medium this election season:

Taken the morning of August 13, 9:45AM

Two things become obvious:

1. Clickbait was at least 25x more effective at driving clicks than more thoughtful and less tricksy headline writing.
2. Far fewer people actually read the clickbait piece proportionally than anything else I’d written. That 18% read ratio remained constant from when only 1,000 people had clicked on the story to 248,000. I found that quite interesting. (And duh! You click on a piece expecting one thing, and then that dick of an author says “ha ha, sucker, this is about something else,” a lot of people are not going to read it.)

Okay, there’s an easy analytical correlation vs. causation argument to be made about point 1 above, which is that maybe this piece was just BETTER than anything else I had written before; maybe people wanted to share it more for qualitative reasons, making it go super viral. Maybe some portion of that is true — it’s hard for me to judge the relative qualitative merits of my writing.

But I think the much lower percentage of people reading it to completion argues that this is a much WORSE piece than anything I’d written before. And certainly, there were critical comments that were hilariously and elaborately negative about my writing in response to the piece.

I love this so much. It’s so pure in its attack, yet so economical with its words.

So, I find it hard to conclude that this is a case of once-in-a-lifetime superior writing yielding an outsized result. More likely, this is a combination of: Timely Topic + Telling People What They Want to Hear + Clickbait Headline & Image = Boffo Results.

As for the lower read results, a quick perusal of the list will lead one to see that even though a smaller percentage of people read it, it produced more readers by a factor of at least 12x than anything I’d written on Medium before. A loss in funnel efficiency of about 50% from click to read, but given the massive increase in clicks, who cares?

He Thought He Understood What Was Wrong. What He Learned May Surprise You…

The impact of this result has me on my back heels as an armchair critic of media. Now that I’ve seen how effective it is, how the hell do you criticize people who write clickbait? This is very clearly the way to break through a cluttered media landscape. It is perhaps the only way. And that worries me a lot. I hope it worries you too. Having seen the awful power my clickbait headline unleashed after a couple days, I may have muttered, like Oppenheimer, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Which leads me to the first point raised earlier: sites like US Uncut and Occupy Democrats use this sort of tactic to gain attention in a landscape that is rigged against them and the real problem is corporate ownership of the media.

This is the part in the article where I cop out because I am left after this week realizing this is almost certainly true and I don’t know what to do about it. If your mission is to get out alternative news to the stories corporate media are selling, then social media + the cloud are gifts on the surface of things — you can reach the audience directly without the barriers to entry of broadcast licenses, transmission towers, printing presses, or even server ownership or rental. And as my data show, that’s complete nonsense. Because with no barrier to entry, everyone has entered. Clickbait was born as a way to cut through the noise of a billion voices.

The cost of reaching people through old media is paid by purchasing and controlling infrastructure; the cost of reaching people through new media is paid by writing intentionally manipulative headlines. Which is more expensive?

Now, my core point in the original piece stands. Even if you decide to use clickbait to get the masses to hear your alternative voice, you still had better do some damned reporting. Repackaging someone else’s reporting and putting your spin on it (whatever spin will make your readers feel good about themselves — be they liberals, leftists, neo-nazis or fans of Doctor Who) is not an “alternative voice” worthy of defense by anyone intellectually honest. It is still just bullshit curation to get ad views.

But I’m left wondering: how on earth do serious alternative journalists break through and get heard without resorting to these tactics? And, as the media landscape gets more and more crowded, won’t the media companies fully adopt these methods as well?

If clickbait right now is the stone in David’s sling to take down the Goliath of corporate media, you better believe Corporate media is in the midst of training an army of Davids. (I think I might have mixed my metaphor there. You know what I mean.) If the results of this kind of headline are at all reproducible — lifting readership from a media source by 10, 15, 20x — this will be the way all media is presented in the coming days. (I won’t be running the experiments necessary to try to reproduce it, by the way. I hope you won’t either.)

Facebook and others will try technological means to cut down on clickbait, but unless we learn a better method of curation than “what our friends share” or “what headlines look like something I hope to be true,” we are, as a people, in a highly manipulable state. We have to retrain ourselves or we are going to be arguing with each other based on factoids we’ve all gleaned from clickbait headlines.

You Have To See This Epic Takedown

John Oliver had a fantastic piece this past week about where journalism is going with newsrooms getting repeatedly cut.

Core to his piece is discussion of the repackaging of news endemic to clickbaiting (though he doesn’t talk about clickbaiting in particular). It is very worth watching:

That TRONC video at 10:35? Yeah… That’s a company that will soon be adopting all clickbait, all the time. When they say “optimizing,” they mean looking at charts like the stats I put above for my Medium readership and learning how to drive journalists around numbers like that.

And one of the reasons why corporate media will so easily use this tool is seen by many of the comments I received from my clickbait piece. They demonstrate that our political discourse is now more akin to our discussion of professional sports, where the only concern is who’s winning and who’s losing. The media companies that have covered sports for decades are going to be better at manipulating our hunger for politisports coverage than any “alternative voice” could ever be.

They Thought It Was Better to Win Than to Be Right, Until They Learned This One Weird Trick…

I appreciated all of the critiques I received this week (some of which were really strongly worded and very well written). I even received a sharp take down from the son of one of my mentors, which reminded me of the scene in the Godfather II when Frank Pentangeli’s brother walks into the courtroom… but I digress.

Many of the critiques demonstrated to me the sloppiness of my own thinking and writing first and foremost (e.g. I was factually wrong about something in my first version), but secondarily, they showed me the unmitigated power of confirmation bias.

So many of the comments, if I could boil them down, were, “Yeah, sure, that site may be manipulating us, but you work for the Clinton campaign and they do it too, so you should shut up.” (I don’t. But I am a Clinton supporter; I’m hella biased.)

It was more important to some commenting to point out which side I was on, than to even contemplate my argument. I do this constantly, so believe me I will be throwing no stones in my house made of towering walls of glass. But this adventure in clickbait helped me clearly see this phenomenon:

1. We click on things that tell us what we already know we want to hear because they confirm our positive or negative biases. Anyone who does not actively manipulate that desire will quickly learn that they can’t get our attention.
2. We embrace news from people who are on our side.
3. We ignore or discredit the ideas of people who are not on our side.
4. We are certain mass media and people who are not on our side are lying to us and manipulating us, but we are open to manipulation by people who are on our side.
5. Go Back to Step 1.

That is a witches’ brew of disinformation and a litany of self-inflicted wounds on our polity. And it’s not just impacting media.

I submit that Trump is the first clickbait candidate. When he says things like “Obama founded ISIS,” it plays directly into the cycle above. It grabs attention. We get a rush of either agreeing or disagreeing. We argue back and forth. And all the while, we spend our time talking about Trump. He gets whatever the political equivalent of ad views is.

If we don’t learn how to require deeper discussion — from ourselves, our media and our leaders — we are on our way to becoming a clickbait nation.

I wrote an article last Sunday that absolutely played into this fantastically broken ecosystem and I am very sorry. I’ve shared everything I learned in the hopes that it can help smarter people than me think of solutions. Or at the very least further a conversation.

NOTES:

In my previous piece, I decided to follow a rule I used to follow in the 90s when the Internet was young, which was to only edit and change typos, but not to fundamentally change the writing if I could avoid it. That feels dishonest to me. I added important points I wished I’d thought of to Updates. I’ll do that here too.