Engagement bait
Content built to provoke clicks, shares, comments, or reactions rather than to inform, so that the platform's ranking rewards it and the audience's attention is harvested.
Platforms rank content by the reactions it gets, and the device is content engineered for reactions. The curiosity-gap headline ("you won't believe what happened next") withholds the point so the click supplies it; the vote bait ("like if you agree, share if you're angry") turns engagement itself into the content; the quiz, the countdown, the incomplete list each exist to be interacted with. The audience's attention is the product, sold to advertisers or spent on whatever the operator wants seen.
The device is the digital economy's version of the slogan and the hook. Facebook described and penalised it by name in 2017 after its own systems had rewarded it for a decade. Its political form, rage farming, has its own entry. Exploits Curiosity Gap and Availability Heuristic.
Historical examples
The site Upworthy grew to tens of millions of monthly readers on a headline formula, "curiosity gap" headlines tested twenty-five variants at a time, that was copied across the industry. When Facebook adjusted its ranking in 2014 to penalise the pattern, the site's traffic fell by more than half, which measured how much of its audience the device had supplied.
Chakraborty, Abhijnan, et al. "Stop Clickbait: Detecting and Preventing Clickbaits in Online News Media." Proceedings of ASONAM 2016; Facebook Newsroom, "News Feed FYI: Click-baiting," 25 August 2014.
Facebook announced in December 2017 that it would demote "engagement bait," posts that "goad people into interacting through likes, shares, comments and other actions," and published a taxonomy: vote baiting, react baiting, share baiting, tag baiting, comment baiting. The announcement was an admission that the platform's own incentives had produced the genre.
Silverman, Henry, and Lin Huang. "Fighting Engagement Bait on Facebook." Facebook Newsroom, 18 December 2017.
In advertising and commerce
Slideshow articles that put one fact per page, quizzes that yield a shareable badge, "which character are you" tests, and countdown lists built to be clicked through are engagement bait as a business model, and the model's traffic figures are published in its investors' materials. The content exists to be interacted with; the interaction is sold.
Marwick, Alice, and Rebecca Lewis. Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online. New York: Data & Society Research Institute, 2017; Tufekci, Zeynep. "YouTube, the Great Radicalizer." The New York Times, 10 March 2018, on engagement-driven recommendation.
Look at the last ten things you clicked. For each: did the content deliver what the headline promised, and who benefited from the click?
In the wild
Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.
"She opened the door and couldn't believe what she saw. Number 6 will leave you speechless."
What to notice. A curiosity gap: the headline withholds the content so the click must supply it.
"Like if you love your mother. Share if you're not ashamed of your country."
What to notice. Vote and share bait; the engagement is the content and the metric is the goal.
The page posts a poll with no purpose every hour: "Cats or dogs? Comment below!"
What to notice. Content engineered to be reacted to, so the ranking system carries the page's other posts.
Sources
- Chakraborty, Abhijnan, Bhargavi Paranjape, Sourya Kakarla, and Niloy Ganguly. "Stop Clickbait: Detecting and Preventing Clickbaits in Online News Media." ASONAM 2016. doi:10.1109/ASONAM.2016.7752207
- Silverman, Henry, and Lin Huang. "Fighting Engagement Bait on Facebook." Facebook Newsroom, 18 December 2017.
- Wu, Tim. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. New York: Knopf, 2016. ISBN 978-0385352017