The art of clickbait captions
We all have seen at least one of these clickbaits (or some variation thereof):
"single mom discovers the meaning of life with a simple trick"
or
"billionaires don't want you to know this secret"
or
"the 10 things that only real survivors do"
or
"you could be sitting on a fortune"
At face value they just seem cheap psychological tricks. They place the reader in the position to wish to belong to a certain group, and they suggest that membership can be attained with the only effort of clicking somewhere.
As a test I wrote:
If you want to be really famous you only have to click here.
but it does not quite stand the comparison.
Am I being too strict in judging my own clickbait, or is there a deeper art to crafting it?
4 answers
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Clickbait isn't like news where you tell someone the headline so they'll click for more information.
Eggplant linked to lower cancer rates.
Clickbait is where they have to click just to find out the headline.
This one vegetable stops cancer!
There's no nuance in clickbait. Not like medical articles where you use caution about overselling things.
Never tell readers to "click here," because that should be what your headlines makes them think. If you have to tell them, you've lost.
Clickbait creates promises. Sometimes it is about making money, achieving fame, or curing disease. But other times it's a promise of great entertainment.
Whale thanks her rescuer with this incredible move.
The purpose of clickbait is eyeballs (getting the visitor counts up), not to inform, or even to sell. And you do this in part by teasing something someone can't find out via the regular news.
Put this all together and you get lines like:
7 secrets of fame celebrities don't want you to know.
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Use a definite article (like the word this) prior to a hypernym (like the word thing), where using a more precise sub-ordinate noun (referent) would betray all necessary information to decide if you should click it. In the example below, if there's no highway 12 in your area: you wouldn't.
There was a number of fatalities resulting from this incident. – partofspeech.org
De-clickbaited:
There was a number of fatalities resulting from [the crash on highway 12].
I can't think of a hypernym for famous, which is the problem. With that word you've already laid all your cards on the table; I don't want to be famous... just like how there's no highway 12 in my area.
The rich and powerful do this.
Now that's some clickbait. Because (who doesn't want to be rich and powerful?) you're actually talking about celebrities, whom in the grand scheme of things, aren't all that powerful or rich. So, we're back to fame, and now I don't even care what 'that' was, because if being rich and powerful requires fame then I'm out.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/45430. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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If you want to be really famous you only have to click here.
- "you only have to click here" - you can remove that. Your audience knows how the internet works. They know that in order to receive more information, they have to click. It's obvious.
- "If you want to be" What do you mean, if you want? Your audience must know about your amazing secret. There is no choice for them to make here. Tell them that.
The secret to become famous you must know.
You could also make this more urgent by inciting some paranoia. Claim that there is some conspiracy which wants to keep that information secret and you are providing the extremely rare chance to learn about it:
The secret to become famous celebrities don't want you to know.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/45341. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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All of those examples imply there is some specific kind of secret knowledge you can learn quickly that will change your life.
In your example, "really famous" is not specific enough. First, in writing, "really" is an intensifier without meaning. What exactly is the difference between being "famous" and "really famous"? Or "mad" and "really mad"?
Even then, famous for what? Ted Bundy is really famous as a serial killer of 30 young women and girls.
Your examples make specific major promises easily learned: The secret of life with one simple trick. A single secret that implies you might become a billionaire. Ten specific actions that might save your life. There is a way you might be rich and unaware of it.
For your example, "One simple trick to gain thousands of new twitter followers" would be click-bait for people that want to become famous.
The trick is to offer something specific that people will want (a product, an experience, knowledge) in return for an extremely small specific effort. That is why such offers are often followed by "You won't believe #4!": Disbelief and surprise are typically pleasant visceral experiences, and you are teasing that with a specific slide (or list item).
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