Clickbaiting

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

With clickbait or click bait is critical of the media , a process called content on the World Wide Web with a Clickbait to praise. Clickbaits serve the purpose of achieving higher access numbers and thus, among other things, more advertising income through Internet advertising or greater brand awareness of the target page or the author.

A clickbait usually consists of a sensational headline that creates a so-called curiosity gap . It gives the reader just enough information to arouse their curiosity, but not enough to satisfy that curiosity, similar to a cliffhanger . The heading can be supplemented or replaced by graphic elements with the same function.

The articles behind a clickbait are usually well equipped with facilities for quick sharing on social networks , which also increases the number of hits.

functionality

Behind many links, which are provided with a clickbait, there are videos, picture series or listicles . Such content is often of poor journalistic quality, but spreads particularly well on social media. However, there are also online magazines that add clickbait titles to more serious topics such as discrimination or surveillance .

Topics that arouse the reader's feelings, such as animals or babies , are particularly popular for clickbaiting. The stories that clickbait headlines are often far less spectacular than the headline promises.

history

Although the term clickbaiting was only established with the advent of the World Wide Web , the origins of the construct can be located much earlier. For example, if you look at the development of the early tabloid press around 1900, the so-called yellow press , you can see some similarities and parallels to today's clickbaiting. The most drastic and sensational headlines were used to maximize circulation sales. In the recent past, some developments can be named that have favored the emergence of clickbaiting: Due to the digitization of journalism, publishers and editors are dependent on generating clicks. In addition, the function of headings has changed from summarizing the content to being a bait for readers.

Occurrence

BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post have been among the pioneers of clickbaiting since 2006 . In Germany the online magazine “heftig.co” was a pioneer; whose headlines achieved more reach in social networks than Spiegel Online , for example . Also Focus and DerWesten work with Clickbait headings, as well as the video portal Youtube .

to form

The different forms of clickbaiting can be categorized based on different characteristics. With regard to the formal structure , four forms can be distinguished:

  1. Listicles: Combinations of lists and articles (e.g. 13 things that you are guaranteed not to know about your smartphone)
  2. Questions: hypothetical, rhetorical formulations that can convey and suggest content and behavior (e.g. how much do you really know about your smartphone?)
  3. Forward referencing: referring to upcoming parts of the interaction or a piece of content (e.g. for this reason you should switch off your smartphone while sleeping)
  4. Thumbnails: Thumbnails of videos that attract attention (e.g. presentation of extraordinary things or attractive people who are often of little or no relevance to the video)

With regard to the stylistic devices used , a distinction is made between eight design forms (according to Mayer, based on the classification of Biyani et al.):

  1. Exaggeration: false promises by headline
  2. Teaser: omission of content
  3. Provocation: using inappropriate or vulgar terms
  4. Formatting: Exaggerated use of capitalization or punctuation marks
  5. Metaphor: pictorial description of suggestive, disturbing and unbelievable things
  6. Forwarding: Announced content not on the target page, further clicks necessary
  7. Ambiguity: ambiguity and ambiguity
  8. Misleading: factually wrong heading

Psychological motivations

The psychological reasons behind the click behavior of recipients are diverse. An essential cognitive factor that has been researched in various scientific papers is the so-called information gap or curiosity gap. It is assumed here that people feel the desire to fill a (supposed) knowledge gap. Accordingly, clickbait suggests a feeling of a lack of information in recipients, which can only be eliminated by obtaining information. The study by Pengate (2016) is suitable as an emotion-focused approach to explaining click behavior through clickbaiting, in which it was possible to show that clickbait headings can induce pupillary changes that can serve as a gauge for emotional arousal. The level of emotional arousal also influenced the intention to continue reading the article.

criticism

The allegation of clickbaiting is often heard. Harald Staun reported in the FAZ that serious online editors wanted nothing to do with clickbaiting, but at the same time gave a counterexample. In the social network Twitter , several users revealed the resolution behind various clickbaiting titles in order to make visiting the page superfluous. Dennis Weber wrote in the magazinequote meter that clickbaiting had already been practiced in printed newspapers. Clickbaiting on the Internet is only trying to attract users. Providers like Buzzfeed would only react to the demand of their users who only want "pure information" without "flood of text". Many texts should not have any journalistic relevance; they would be for entertainment.

In August 2015, TV Movie magazine came under fire for adding a clickbait headline to an article on cancer by Roger Willemsen . The German-language edition of the Huffington Post was criticized in 2016 by Meedia for clickbaiting with incitement to refugees.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ children from clickbait warn to go Look! , a media policy initiative of the federal government, accessed on August 21, 2015
  2. ↑ a b Harald Staun: Headline prose . In: FAZ.net . May 25, 2014, accessed October 25, 2015 .
  3. ↑ a b c d Manuela Kanies: About criticism of heftig.co and imitators of the "click bait". In: noz .de. July 12, 2014, accessed August 19, 2015 .
  4. ↑ a b "Save yourself the click" reveals which stories you don't need to read. In: meedia .de. June 4, 2014, accessed August 19, 2015 .
  5. ↑ a b c d Fabian Mayer: How much do you really know about clickbait? - 7 surprising facts you've never heard of like this! In: Markus Appel (ed.): The psychology of the post-factual: About fake news, "Lügenpresse", Clickbait & Co. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg 2020, ISBN 978-3-662-58695-2 , p. 67-79 , doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-662-58695-2_7 .
  6. ↑ Henrik Örnebring, Anna Maria Jönsson: Tabloid journalism and the public sphere: a historical perspective on tabloid journalism . In: Journalism Studies . tape 5 , no. 3 , August 1, 2004, ISSN  1461-670X , p. 283-295 , doi : 10.1080 / 1461670042000246052 .
  7. ↑ Click Bait: You Won't Believe What Happens Next! | Fronteiras: Journal of Social, Technological and Environmental Science . December 12, 2016, doi : 10.21664 / 2238-8869.2016v5i2.p196-213 ( edu.br [accessed March 21, 2020]).
  8. ↑ Misleading Online Content | Proceedings of the 2015 ACM on Workshop on Multimodal Deception Detection. Retrieved March 21, 2020 .
  9. ↑ Jeffrey Kuiken, Anne Schuth, Martijn Spitters, Maarten Marx: Effective Headlines of Newspaper Articles in a Digital Environment . In: Digital Journalism . tape 5 , no. 10 , November 26, 2017, ISSN  2167-0811 , p. 1300-1314 , doi : 10.1080 / 21670811.2017.1279978 .
  10. ↑ pEtEr Withoutfield: Everything for the clicks: How much FOCUS Online is kidding its readers. In: blogrebellen.de. October 17, 2014, accessed October 25, 2015 .
  11. ↑ Mats Schönauer: Clickbait cockroach eats the "West". In: Übermedien . August 1, 2018, accessed March 15, 2020 .
  12. ↑ polygon.com: YouTube's clickbait problem reaches new heights
  13. ↑ Bram Vijgen: The listicle: An exploring research on an interesting shareable new media phenomenon . No. 59 . Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai-Ephemerides, S. 103-122 .
  14. ↑ Linda Lai, Audun Farbrot: What makes you click? The effect of question headlines on readership in computer-mediated communication . In: Social Influence . tape 9 , no. 4 , October 2, 2014, ISSN  1553-4510 , p. 289–299 , doi : 10.1080 / 15534510.2013.847859 .
  15. ↑ Jonas Nygaard Blom, Kenneth Reinecke Hansen: Click bait: Forward-reference as lure in online news headlines . In: Journal of Pragmatics . tape 76 , January 1, 2015, ISSN  0378-2166 , p. 87–100 , doi : 10.1016 / j.pragma.2014.11.010 ( sciencedirect.com [accessed March 23, 2020]).
  16. ↑ a b Savvas Zannettou, Sotirios Chatzis, Kostantinos Papadamou, Michael Sirivianos: The Good, the Bad and the Bait: Detecting and Characterizing Clickbait on YouTube . In: 2018 IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW) . IEEE, San Francisco, CA 2018, ISBN 978-1-5386-8276-0 , pp. 63–69 , doi : 10.1109 / SPW.2018.00018 ( ieee.org [accessed March 23, 2020]).
  17. ↑ a b Prakhar Biyani, Kostas Tsioutsiouliklis, John Blackmer: "8 Amazing Secrets for Getting More Clicks": Detecting Clickbaits in news streams Using Article informality . In: D. Schuurman & M. Wellman (Eds.): Proceedings of the 30th AAAI conference on artificial intelligence . S. 94-100 .
  18. ↑ Click Bait: You Won't Believe What Happens Next! | Fronteiras: Journal of Social, Technological and Environmental Science . doi : 10.21664 / 2238-8869.2016v5i2.p196-213 ( edu.br [accessed March 23, 2020]).
  19. ↑ Jonas Nygaard Blom, Kenneth Reinecke Hansen: Click bait: Forward-reference as lure in online news headlines . In: Journal of Pragmatics . tape 76 , January 1, 2015, ISSN  0378-2166 , p. 87–100 , doi : 10.1016 / j.pragma.2014.11.010 ( sciencedirect.com [accessed March 23, 2020]).
  20. ↑ George Loewenstein: The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation. In: Psychological Bulletin . tape 116 , no. 1 , 1994, ISSN  0033-2909 , pp. 75-98 , doi : 10.1037 / 0033-2909.116.1.75 .
  21. ↑ Misleading Online Content | Proceedings of the 2015 ACM on Workshop on Multimodal Deception Detection. Retrieved March 23, 2020 (English).
  22. ↑ Supavich Fone Pengnate: Measuring Emotional Arousal in Clickbait: Eye-Tracking Approach . In: JF Nunamaker, B. Shin, R. Nickerson, & R. Sharda (Eds.): Proceeding of the 22nd Americas conference on information systems . S. 1433-1441 .
  23. ↑ Dennis Weber, Sidney Schering: Buzzfeed Style Everywhere: Can 'Clickbait' Help Journalism? In: quotenmeter.de. Retrieved August 19, 2015 .
  24. ↑ How Bauer's TV Movie does clickbaiting with Roger Willemsen's cancer. In: meedia.de. August 18, 2015, accessed August 19, 2015 .
  25. ↑ Why Juliane Leopold was really thrown out on BuzzFeed (be careful, mean clickbaiting!) Meedia.de, March 11, 2016