blah blah blah, what happened next will blow your mind

I'm just amazed at how easily people are manipulated again and again into giving their 5 minutes of daily rage. All for the sake of advertising dollars.

The easiest way to be manipulated is fooling yourself into thinking that you can't. Nobody is immune from a catchy headline because at the end of the day it's just good copywriting. The only difference is that different people place value on different things. Wickedfire wouldn't give a fuck about a headline like "Kim Kardashian's dropped her luggage at the airport and you won't believe what fell out for all to see" but we can't click fast enough for a headline that reads "Matt Cutts accidentally revealed a secret during an interview and now wembasters are cashing in".

Even when people know what's behind the headline is probably bullshit they can't help but click because it's already captured their attention and the risk is so low compared to the potential reward.
 



cant.stop.watching

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Gary Halbert asked another copywriter what he thought the number one reason anyone buys is.

The copywriter said, self-interest.

Gary said, that's not it, it's curiosity.

Dictionary.com defines curiosity as:

the desire to learn or know about anything; inquisitiveness.
2.
a curious, rare, or novel thing.
3.
a strange, curious, or interesting quality.
4.
Archaic. carefulness; fastidiousness.

Same thing applies for click throughs, IMO

That's all for now, I'm drunk
 
I think the problem is the majority of us know what clickbaiting is and we know a majority of the marketing tricks and tactics used by other marketers cause it's our jobs. What we tend to think is that our target audience has the same intelligence we do. As a reminder, remember the average person has an IQ of only 100, meaning there is a good chuck of people that are way below that average.

As you are doing your marketing campaigns remember for the most part this is generally the perfect target user's understanding of the world (Depending on what you are selling ;)):

B1_3btf_IQAAwcwo.jpg


Now tell me with a straight face this person won't click those clickbait articles...
 
As a reminder, remember the average person has an IQ of only 100, meaning there is a good chuck of people that are way below that average.​

Too true, that old '6th grade reading level' standard when writing copy still holds up like a champ.

I just went to Wafo for the first time in years, perfect case study for your point. The posts on that board are still painful to read.
 
I have twenty-five very compelling comments about this. #19 is amazing.

Click Next to see point #1
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Anyone who clicks on these bs clickbait articles are morons. All these Buzzfeed sites and Gawker and such are just glorified content mills. Can't wait for Google to whoop them soon enough.

That's what distinguishes them from the content mills of yesteryear. They've grown and adapted like the parasites they are... They don't give a fuck about organic search traffic.