Clickbait existed before clicking did
鈥淲hen you find out what these kids are jumping into, your jaw will drop!鈥�
鈥淏aby ducks see water for the first time鈥攃an you BELIEVE what they do?鈥�
Confronted with such emotionally charged lines, it鈥檚 almost impossible not to click. Do the tykes tumble into a vat of chocolate syrup? Are ducklings reaching for toothpaste to brush their beaks? Can you summon the willpower to direct your itching index finger away from the mousepad? Or, will you take the clickbait?
It鈥檚 easy to think the internet is to blame for the brain-tease-and-skeez that is upclickbait, or “the use of sensationalized headlines to lure people to click an online link.” We may be hypersensitive to clickbait because of the internet, but it’s actually been around for a lot longer than we thought. Clickbaiting is really just “yellow journalism,” by another name. Sensationalized news is nothing new.聽So, let’s take a closer look at the language used to get people to read something (whether misleading, or not) from criers to newspapers to the internet.
Town crier: the original clickbaiter?
The original clickbaiter was quite possibly the town crier in medieval Europe, bellowing the King鈥檚 news while interjecting teasers to visit the “finest” alehouse in the land. (After which, he鈥檇 shout a reminder that residents not pee or poop in the river the day before the alehouse brewed beer, a process that required drawing water from the, ideally excrement-free, river.) If this sounds like advertising, it is. If this sounds like providing just enough information to compel people to do certain things (like visit the alehouse and the outhouse), it is. Figuratively speaking, today鈥檚 clickbait also sends people to the alehouse or the outhouse; either to guzzle entertaining, intoxicating blather or to bear witness to the stinging stench of literary effluvium.
“Flip-bait” and yellow journalism
Clickbaiting speaks to the incestuous relationship between news and advertising, as the town-crier well recognized. Nineteenth-century journalism exploited this relationship and devised pre-clickbait baiting ruses of its own. In a heated circulation battle between the news giants of the 1890s鈥擩oseph Pulitzer of the New York World and William Randolph Hearst of the New York Journal鈥攅xaggerated headlines, fake news, big scandals, emotional manipulation, and splashy pictures filled the dailies to entice readers to buy. Clickbait 1.0, or “flip-bait” of the era, tempting people to flip the page.
Newspapers that engaged in flip-bait exaggeration were practicing yellow journalism, so-called because a popular comic-strip character named Yellow Kid pranced around the pages of New York World in an effort to jack up sales. Dressed in a yellow night-shirt that served as his speech bubble, the bald man-baby from the slums said weird things like 鈥淕ee! Wots de matter? I feel turrible worse.,鈥� 鈥淒is is grate stuff!,鈥� and 鈥淗ully gee!,鈥� while smoking cigars, swigging champagne, and engaging in racist boxing matches. Preposterous as it may seem now, Yellow Kid got people flipping.
Clickbaiting today: you won鈥檛 BELIEVE the ploys to get you clicking
Over a hundred years later, clickbait pros like BuzzFeed, Upworthy, and now the Onion鈥檚 satirical ClickHole, continue to employ techniques ripe for hoaxes, hoodwinking, scandal-mongering, cheap thrills, and/or ridiculous oversimplification. When in search of a verbal “alehouse,” the techniques can be funny; when seeking legitimate news, the clickbait can make you feel like you’re in a stinking outhouse.
In the spirit of true clickbait culture, here鈥檚 a little listicle of some linguistic maneuvers content-creators deploy in their clickbait titles:
- 鈥淐onnotation-rich vocabulary鈥� (described by linguist Deborah Schaffer): like weird, shocking, pregnant, victim, sex, tragedy
- A longer emotionally-charged line describing a theme, followed by a shorter, cryptic sentence: 鈥淵ou鈥檒l be astounded to know how Pixie the Monkey recovered. But, it鈥檚 not how you think.鈥� The longer sentence usually features a variation of: 鈥淵ou鈥檒l be shocked . . .鈥� 鈥淵ou won鈥檛 believe . . .鈥� 鈥淵our faith in humanity will be restored/destroyed . . . .鈥澛� In other words, 鈥淲e鈥檙e telling you you鈥檒l feel this way, so you鈥檒l click and make us money. Then, we鈥檒l probably disappoint you.鈥�
- Vague pronoun reference: 鈥淭his will blow your mind,鈥� (What, exactly?), 鈥淗e鈥檚 finally calling it quits鈥� (奥丑辞鈥檚 calling what quits, and who cares?).
- The teaser 鈥渨hat happens next鈥� without any actual information about what happens next: 鈥淢ale nurse knocked up four colleagues. With his fist. What happens next is insane.鈥� (Right, a big brawny brawl in a hospital. Next.)
Whenever you feel the urge to curse the interwebs, remember clickbait isn鈥檛 new.聽Digital “clicking” technologies just make it more in-your-face, instantaneous, and omnipresent now.
Oh, and by the way, if you did take the clickbait to see what those kiddies were jumping into and just what the HECK those ducklings did鈥攕poiler鈥攊t鈥檚 a swimming pool and the baby quackers drank the water.
