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Italy is now leading the fight against fakenews and clickbait strategies with an international committee including, among others, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times Editors-in-Chief, Apple and WhatsApp CEOs, Eric Schmidt from Google and Alphabet. The International Council of Organization's board is chaired by Andrea Ceccherini, founder of the Osservatorio Permanente Giovani – Editori (Permanent Observatory of Young Publishers).
Yet, are you sick of Clickbait Titles? Here are three easy but priceless tips on what to do.
First: ignore them. Pretty simple, isn't it? They're easy to tell apart, just smile and pass by.
Second: resist that itch caused by the so called "curiosity gap" clickbait headlines typically aim to exploit. You know you'll soon regret wasting that little bit of your time in clicking on it.
Third: count to ten before you share and be sure to take this time to read the post through and not to keep scrolling down your feed.
As a journalist, I know that clickbait titles are dangerous because they frustrate readers expectations for a story that promised more than it eventually delivers. They betray the reader’s trust, lead to reduced satisfaction, higher bounce rates and short average time on site. They diminish the value of an article, not to mention the impact of misleading titles on the decoding and comprehension of a text. At the end they affect the standing of my website (blog, forum, Social profile…) and my own as well.
As a marketer I know that clickbait tactics are bad for my business because they betray customers and prospects trust, as the content is not adequate. They diminish the value of my products, lead to fewer conversions and affect the whole reputation of my brand.
Not surprisingly the same reasons.
Good clickbait marketing drives and increases traffic but it's only good if you want to make money off of clicking. Remember someone saying “Content is king”? You can either get money or respect, but it's very hard to get both.
Also, clickbait titles raise an extra issue of concern that brings us back to news making. It is about the risk brought by pieces of false ‒ or at least unchecked ‒ information spreading across the web, as people tend to share contents just by the title, without reading in detail, on a large scale, now. More and more fake but extremely fascinating contents grow in importance and ranking, thanks to a strong exposure delivered by Social Media and by the traditional media system. Limited data and lacking information bring confusion and narration steals the show.
Nevertheless I don't agree with those who say that clickbait headlines are here to stay. I'm confident, positive and optimistic. The Web is still young and easily falls into temptation. Like babies we love clicking on anything colourful, flashing and sexy. But we're growing and this will make clickbait marketing less and less profitable, step by step. We'll definitely free the Internet from clickbait titles one day!
All I hope is that parody websites will resist longer because I really adore them.
PS. You can have fun making clickbait titles yourself on this website:
www.contentrow.com/tools/link-bait-title-generator
