A really important matter: clickbait!
Today I want to talk about an important matter for me. Deforestation? World peace? Nope. Clickbait! But wait, what is it? It’s a very interesting web phenomenon. Basically, it’s when people post on the internet (especially YouTube) content with the one purpose of attract users and make them click on a link to a specific You Tube video or web page.
When you spend more time on YouTube that you like to admit, then you have a serious problem aaand you learn how to avoid stupid clickbait monsters. Provocative headlines and catchy thumbnails are the first clues you have to look for when you want to expose a clickbait monster. I completely understand that for most youtubers posting videos is a real job and to be honest with you they make a substantial living out of it. A substantial living. Just google it, it will blow your mind.
But the point here is that I get that it’s a marketing thing, it’s all about money and most youtubers treat it like a common job. However, if you look closely and think deeply about the matter, you’ll find out that it’s not a regular job and clickbait titles are quite annoying actually.
Youtubers are what they are (famous, rich and bla bla bla) because people like you and me watch their videos. Over the years millions of people have grown quite fond of them, millions of people have spent their time on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat whatever) following their life. As cheesy as it sounds, for some people youtubers are like some kind of friends. There’s some sort of personal connection between a youtuber and his/her viewers. So please very important YT people, try to be nice to us. We understand it’s your job but please don’t deceive us. No, I won’t buy that magic cleaning product, no I won’t subscribe to that magazine and no I won’t play that candy-crush substitute. And if you cut yourself with a knife while you were cutting your organic avocado, you don’t need to tell me about your “scary ER ride|| STORYTIME” I don’t care.
As a fellow YT fan, I have to agree with you, clickbait has become a problem throughout the platform. But especially for smaller and upcoming channels. In the early days of Youtube, you only could get noticed if the content you were posting was original and creative and as a new platform it was rather easy to achieve. But nowadays, if you want to start your own successful channel you will either rely on brand advertisement or on clickbaits, simply because what determines success now is the amount on your pay check at the end of the month, and not your ideas or the original content you are creating.
This has become problematic for smaller channels with around 100,000 subscribers, as some will trick their own audience rather than simply sharing their content on their different social media accounts. It has gotten to a point where the viewers have called them out for it. Yet in this video (watch from 4:10) the youtuber makes a point on what she considers clickbait and the grey area around it. Is it clickbait if you put forward something that actually happened in the video, even if it’s not long? She argues that in a way she chooses the highlight of her video based on what people might be interested in, to get more views obviously.
At the end of the day, I can in a way understand why youtubers do it, and I have no problem with it as long as it is not always the case. As you said clickbaiting is a marketing strategy yet on platforms where you would hope to find something genuine and relatable, being seen as an obvious product is very unsettling.















