The topic of clickbaiting is being discussed more and more. Unfortunately, this is usually because certain spam sites and portals consistently overstep the mark, reaping severe criticism from the world of online media. Announcements about miracle cures have led to elderly people being tricked into buying incorrect medicine, while falsified information about celebrities that include a name and a photo are considered invasions of privacy and public slander. In some cases, readers have even been presented with images of a handful of celebrities with taglines like ‘one of these celebrities has died’ or ‘guess which of these four celebrities has cancer’. It’s for these reasons that clickbaiting is so frowned upon – it toys with the emotions of users and warps the truth in order to trick the general public for the sake of increasing personal gain. Other complaints are that it’s annoying, distracting, unnecessary, and that it’s a bad influence for children.
But there are of course some positive aspects to clickbaiting that have made it such a phenomenon of modern online communication. From a marketing perspective, clickbait is certainly an interesting topic, particularly since it’s focused on the monetization of websites on the whole. For readers who run online blogs and wish to earn money from them, the most important thing is to generate clicks. The more clicks and therefore website traffic that you can generate, the higher price you can put on ad space featured on your blog. And it’s been proven that sites using clickbait tactics tend to have very high click rates, so the technique clearly does work. It’s the lack of real quality on the site at the end that is so heavily criticized, so if you can ensure that you provide quality content on your blog and try to avoid lies and rumors in your clickbait titles, you may be able to avoid criticism, too.