According to the Macmillan Dictionary, click-bait is ‘a link on a website that is designed to catch people’s attention and encourage them to read on’.
Yet surely click-bait is more nefarious than that? Following to the above, any headline that aims to attract readers would be classed as click bait, including any genuinely great piece of content with an attractive headline. What is missing in Macmillan’s definition is the overt sensationalist nature involved in click-baiting – where articles are deliberately mis-labelled in order to drive traffic.
Just ask Facebook, which has recently reviewed and adjusted how it treats articles it believes are true clickbait:
‘Click-baiting’ is when a publisher posts a link with a headline that encourages people to click to see more, without telling them much information about what they will see. Posts like these tend to get a lot of clicks, which means that these posts get shown to more people, and get shown higher up in News Feed.
According to Facebook, some 80% of its users want to see headlines that ‘helped them decide if they wanted to read the full article before they had to click through’. The danger, it says, is that click-bait drowns out the content that users are interested in, such as group page updates and content posted by friends.
So how does Facebook tell what is click-bait? In its own words:
One way is to look at how long people spend reading an article away from Facebook. If people click on an article and spend time reading it, it suggests they clicked through to something valuable. If they click through to a link and then come straight back to Facebook, it suggests that they didn’t find something that they wanted. With this update we will start taking into account whether people tend to spend time away from Facebook after clicking a link, or whether they tend to come straight back to News Feed when we rank stories with links in them.
And being a social network, Facebook can easily sniff out bad content by seeing whether it is shared:
Another factor we will use to try and show fewer of these types of stories is to look at the ratio of people clicking on the content compared to people discussing and sharing it with their friends. If a lot of people click on the link, but relatively few people click Like, or comment on the story when they return to Facebook, this also suggests that people didn’t click through to something that was valuable to them.
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