Beyoncé’s Twins Approved this Entry
Ah clickbait. Did I get you? I hope you didn’t believe me, but now that you’ve clicked, I got your attention for a couple minutes until your minuscule millennial attention span overtakes you. No shame, I can relate. It’s strange to think that Beyoncé’s unborn, yet Instagram famous twins nonetheless, can make us click on a link, solely because Beyoncé is involved. How has clickbait become such a phenomenon in our time? Have we become so unbelievably impatient that we only look for extreme scenarios that keep us interested for longer than five seconds, before we open a new tab?
In my opinion, YouTube seems to be the place where I find the most extreme cases of clickbait titles or images. It’s also the place where it got out of hand. But to set things straight, I don’t think it’s wrong to use clickbait as a strategy to get reads or views. Advertisers, newspapers and magazines have been using this strategy for a long time. The role of the advertiser is to attract the human interest and have them engage with the content. Their challenge now is not only to reach us, but also hold on to our limited attention spans, as well as convince us to take that small time out of our hectic lifestyle to further read or view the content. Without the consumer engagement, people don’t’ get paid and companies can’t thrive.
With an anti-clickbait movement at hand, how can brands and advertisers attract new audiences and keep the current loyal consumers interested? I could argue that it will come down to consumer loyalty and quality of branding. For example, if YouTubers with a large following stopped using their titles and thumbnails to get people to click, would their views decrease, or would their “loyal fans” truly be as loyal as claim to be, and keep watching their content? Perhaps, if the YouTuber’s brand has been well-established and well developed from the start, he or she could keep their audience. However, there are lots of people and more specifically, social media users whose opinion can be swayed without much effort. Some individuals don’t take the time to use resources available and educate themselves on a topic along with different perspectives surrounding it. This results in ignorance or people who are bullied or pressured into believing or supporting something they know nothing about. This would be the place where I could refer to the US election for an example, but wouldn’t it be nice to go online and not have to read about it? I’ll save both of us the stress. The filter bubbles social media limits us to can also be factors of why people are uneducated on important topics and opposite opinions.
In my opinion, advertisers should keep on doing what they do and what they have been doing for a long time to get a consumer’s attention. It’s proven to work and even if there are anti-clickbait movements, the consumer mind has already been trained to respond to clickbait or catchy titles and it’ll be hard to go back. As of right now, social media will continue to grow and imbed itself in our lives, and advertisers should remain where they are and be ready to adapt to whatever comes in the future.
