Before starting this post, I watched a video on “Advertisements vs Reality” not for research purpose but *CLICKBAIT* — you will be happy to know I have achieved enlightenment. If I could have achieved enlightenment by clicking on the clickbaits, I would be a genius today.
These catchy headlines are all over the place — news articles, Youtube, social media posts. Clickbaits have infiltrated the internet and have made the internet frustrating. The science of virality, clickbait, is analogous to alchemy that turns lead to gold. Clickbaits play along with our emotions, providing us comfort. But clickbaits are not just in your head — digital marketers, writers, editors play a role all along to understand the behavioural sciences of humans. These folks have mastered the skills to produce compelling clickbaits to grab your attention. While you might feel sadness, anger and fear, you still somehow click on the content.
The pleasure of dopamine high keeps us motivated to constantly be aroused by clickbaits and fall into the pitfall, following links repeatedly. Through every compelling clickbait we click we activate a pathway for dopamine. Dopamine is released and creates an itch that can be fed by the promised clickbait.
Clickbait, noun: Things I don’t like on the Internet. — Joshua Benton, Nieman Journalism lab at Harvard University
How many times have you opened Youtube just to watch a single video but ended up watching more? The reason is clickbaits, it is taking your time as well as mental resources without your knowledge. Social media feeds are full of over-promising headlines. Once you start to ingest articles/videos you anticipate that you are learning something. Ever wondered how credible these clickbaits are? The studies in these articles often limit many factors like geographic location, age, gender. Thus they cannot provide a generalized truth. To mitigate this issue consumers should take a look at the case study on which the article is reporting on and read many studies. But this task of digging the truth is often not so appealing.
The plight of the internet is that everyone wants your attention. And as long as there are clickbaits people will continue to click on it.