The World May Be Ready to Kill Clickbait

I’ve wasted a lot of time in my life being a fool. I’ve been duped time and time again, and I will likely be duped again in the future. It’s not people who are tricking me, at least not directly. It’s advertisements and clickbait.

I usually go online with pure intentions. I want to check my e-mail, Facebook, maybe see some local news, then get to work. In this process I’ll encounter a captivating but too-good-to-be-true headline such as: “I Finally Saw My Abs By Eating This.” I click the article, scroll 80% down the page, close a pop-up with ninja-like reflexes, and finally see the word “bananas.” I knew the article was going to be garbage covered in ads, but I clicked anyway.

Can you really blame sites for this? The Internet is a place where we’ve put advertisements on trash and called it journalism. People click the articles and leave once they realize it’s all a sham. But clickbait keeps popping up because the articles have proven profitable. Thankfully we’re getting smarter and search engines are implementing ways to kill off the clickbait.

This train of thought began thanks to a YouTube video. A quick search confirmed what I believed all along: Google doesn’t like clickbait. This means clicking a video isn’t necessarily going to help the video rank. If you’ve ever listened to someone talk about YouTube’s algorithm…