Does Clickbait Actually Work?

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I think that it does to be honest...

its like the boy who cried wolf...it works a FEW times....

Like Klanka said, it might work a few times. Like on Google news, the Express tends to use highly exaggerated headlines, after clicking the bait a few times I now ignore all links to their stories. I find click bait quite annoying. One story today said Aldi was selling microwaves and kettles that don't use electricity and folks were flocking to buy them... fool I was, and clicked the link and they were kids toys made of wood. Duh.

It works well enough for Youtube

Yes. I have been watching Youtube for ages this evening! Haha! Funny thing you say that.

It works very well on YouTube

Absolute scientific proof that DEBUNKS the belief that "clickbait works"!


https://youtu.be/syva21MO1xA

Different people do it so it makes it very difficult to know what titles are clickbait or not.

There's blatant clickbait that promises something that seems very interesting and then does not deliver at all, and you get wise to that. But everything is still designed to get you to click, even when it's not a blatant lie. It will still emphasize some aspect of what you are meant to click on that is designed to seem the most appealing. And then it's only a partial letdown.

Mum was involved as a writer with her own newspaper column (Though under a different name), but one guy we know who also did the same and still does happens to take it to the next level. Is funny as if we see some funny heading in one of the leading newspapers we know it is him who wrote it (Even if he wrote it for others as some leading well known names don't always write their own articles).

Yes it does, because most humans are either very stupid or just too curious for their own good, especially teenagers which such things are usually targeted at.

It probably doesn't work very well on me. Anything that looks sensationalist, even the use of an exclamation mark, doesn't arouse my curiosity, I just think "that's probably rubbish" and move on. Sometimes I strongly suspect a thing is clickbait but I'll look anyway just to see if I'm right and to give me evidence so that I can expose the authors, e.g. tabloid newspaper editors, as the charlatans they are, to anybody likely to listen to my rants. If it's a Facebook off-site link, I'll normally copy and paste the title into DuckDuckGo, which usually shows the link as the first hit, along with a bit of text from the page, and that avoids the Facebook tracking and often avoids the need to bother visiting the page itself if the DDG text shows it'll be disappointing.

I've been tricked by it on WP though, if misleading thread titles count. I'll see a title that looks like it'll lead to a general discussion of a subject I'm interested in, so I'll click it in the hope of being invited to air my views, but it'll turn out to be about the OP and some matter that has little to do with the title. Not saying it's always deliberate. And there's nothing to stop me airing my views on the topic given in the title anyway, though if it's somebody looking for advice about a serious problem then I'll probably not do that.