Every day I wake up in the morning, get on the internet and feel increasingly like Batman trapped in an elaborate puzzle room by the Riddler.
If you click on the article, spend two seconds on it, and don’t actually read it, have you actually fulfilled the marketing goals of the web site?
For one, you haven’t actually read anything, so there’s nothing to register “this is a good web site with good content and I will read their articles in the future”. No reputation bump from it.
And two, you didn’t have time to actually see the ads, that is, if you didn’t already had an ad-blocker in the first place.
The goals of clickbait don’t actually align with the goals of their profitability.
Well, obviously someone did the math and figured out it’s better to have these titles than not. So I’d say you’re wrong.
If the title makes more people click in the first place and the amount of people who stay to read at least until they know they’re not interested, is bigger than the number of visitors if they had a normal title… the stupid title wins.
