You Won’t Click On This Headline Because This Headline is Not Ridiculous

Quizzes. Lists. Rumors. Outrage essays.

We like to complain that the internet is filled with ridiculous stories that are ultimately about nothing.

While this may be true, anyone with access to reams of analytics data knows something else to be true.

People — you, I, everyone— do consume that stuff. A lot of it. Most of it. Too much of it.

The longer, more-meatier the material, the less interested people are, at least as far as the data suggests.

This is not conjecture, this is fact.

That’s not to say that nobody cares about serious work— we do, as evidenced by the fine work that exists on this very platform, among others — but that data confirms an uncomfortable truth about humans.

We like a lot of dumb stuff.

Throughout history, that may have always been the case, but in 2014 the less salacious your headline, the less explanatory, the less enticing or utterly obvious it is, the less people care about it.

Without something gobsmacking, easily-digestible without having to even look at it, cutting through the noise is practically impossible.

This is a particular problem because not every story is Ferguson or Glenn Greenwald breaking news about the N.S.A.

But the sad fact is this: there is very little ‘must read’ news these days.

You could dump 90% of the internet and we’d all be fine tomorrow. Would I still have air in my lungs if I didn’t read another listicle about the Kardashians? Probably.

At the same time, however, there are a lot of great stories out there, and they don’t all fit into the “HOLY SHIT YOU HAVE TO READ THIS RIGHT NOW!” category.

Those pieces are occasionally longer, more nuanced, and maybe not as easily summed up in a clever tweet or call-to-action Facebook post. Sometimes they’re shorter and sequential, the good ol’ fashioned ‘beat’ a reporter stays on.

But that type of work isn’t particularly celebrated or rewarded in a business that is built on how many shares an article gets on social media.

Where performance is judged by how many people share a story— we’re all just cute little curators these days, right? — nobody is going to be paying attention as the story develops and grows.

So there is far less interest and subsequent investment in that sort of thing. No investment means you can’t pay people to do it, and well, you see where this is going.

My not-so-groundbreaking observation is this: as content has migrated almost fully to the web, something has been lost along the way, and that’s sad. It has to do with how the content gets delivered to us.

Picture a magazine. Really, think about a magazine. It comes in the mail, or you bought it at a newsstand after you saw George Clooney on the cover, maybe you picked it up while waiting in a doctor’s office or at a barbershop.

Content ‘discovery’ is a big thing these days — how do we get people to look at something? — but in a sense, by merely picking up a magazine and opening it, you’ve discovered everything in it. The content is locked within the pages, which is both a terrible and great thing.

It’s great because when a person opens the pages and flips through them, they can ultimately land on a story that sits in the middle— nominally called the “feature well”— and by way of the accompanying photography, the quotes that are pulled out and displayed on the page or just by the fact that the story is in the magazine, they might read it.

With print, there isn’t as much selling involved. Once a person picks it up, they’re locked in. Transaction is complete. Nobody has to entice them to check anything out. What’s more, they might have actually paid for the magazine, so economically the publisher is already making good on whatever they spent to make the thing.

Where it’s terrible is in that specific model. Being locked in. The content is stuck there, between the pages, not able to break free and find the eyeballs who might be somewhere else, online, looking for it. You’d have to scan the pages and, oh man, just thinking about that makes me cringe.

This is an issue because obviously print media is in the toilet, and online the homepage is dying, or may, in fact, be dead already.

But the reality is this, online, nobody really gives a shit where an article comes from anymore. If you looked at your consumption patterns, you’d probably notice it. You don’t care and neither do most other people.

Every article theoretically comes from Facebook now. It kinda makes you wonder why Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t just buy the entire news media business with FB’s cafeteria budget.

I kid, but at the same time I’m also semi-serious. If the primary distribution method for content discovery lies in the hands of one company, I don’t really see what hand content-generating businesses even hold at this point.

Picture Taylor Swift making a great new album and then nobody being able to hear it. Well, that’s kinda what it’s like for every artist not named Taylor Swift these days, and that’s basically what it’s like for companies who make content that is not salacious, ridiculous and an obvious ploy to attract the eyeballs of the internet’s lowest common denominator.

It’s a race to the bottom and it sucks.

At the same time, there is a strong interest from a growing faction of the information-hungry populace in more thoughtful, clever original content. There is. It’s real and it does exist. I have seen it and I have produced it, so I know it’s there.

It’s just a question of this: can that stuff compete with the other crap?

No doubt that there are investors throwing their money into the content business left and right nowadays, which is good for guys like me (and you, who are most likely reading this). Bring your money. All of it.

Some of these businesses, I think, are already profitable, which tells you that maybe winning the content wars is as much about the people running the companies as it is about people on the ground making the stuff. You need strong progressive minds involved, ultimately.

But barring a few outliers, I don’t think we’ve seen any real evidence yet that there’s one specific business model that works for the news and and content businesses online yet.

Most of the profitable businesses have been built on the dumb stuff.

What we are seeing, still, is that you can produce something that is extremely good, interesting and maybe even of public service in some way, and it will just get no attention at all, because it’s not what’s trending on Facebook.

And God forbid someone actually does share this meatier stuff, stuff you might not be so apt to check out, stuff that might be actually important.

You can just click ‘hide’ and it will go away forever.

That’s a troubling reality.