“You’ll never guess what this media trend is doing to your brain.” “This common internet occurrence might be destroying our democracy.” If this article included its own hyperbolic hooks, these phrases might be enough to draw you in, but you may quickly realize the punchy headlines are more dramatic than the rest of the piece. Hopefully, you’ll still be intrigued enough to learn about the how and why behind the topic that you’ll stay long enough to unpack the phenomenon (and you’ll forgive the unnecessarily flashy introduction lines). Clickbait uses headlines that intentionally over-promise and under-deliver. These types of videos and articles follow a relatively unoriginal headline format, and the content of the media often merely restates the headline or copies content from a more genuine news source.

While clickbait may seem like just a harmless nuisance (or a particularly annoying part of your daily scroll), it can actually have far-reaching consequences. These attention-grabbing headlines tend to exploit well-known cognitive biases, like our aversion to uncertainty (the “curiosity gap”) or our tendency to react strongly to emotionally charged stimuli.1 When weaponized at scale, clickbait doesn’t just waste our time; it can also distort our understanding of current events and make it harder to distinguish fact from fiction. Sinister clickbait often fuels misinformation and can polarize public discourse, sometimes shaping our decision-making in subtle but significant ways. 

Yellow Journalism: The American term for journalism that is based on exaggerated or sensationalized features to attract readers. The term was originally coined in the 1890s to describe the two major competing New York newspapers when they began employing attention-grabbing tactics to draw in readers.²

Curiosity Gap: A psychological concept and marketing strategy that highlights the difference between what a person knows and what they want or need to know. It's used to pique interest and motivate individuals to seek more information. By emphasizing a gap, writers and marketers make readers aware of a lack of knowledge, sparking curiosity and driving them to click, read, or engage further.¹ 

Cost-Per-Impression (CPM): An advertising model where advertisers pay a fixed rate per 1,000 impressions (views) of their ad, regardless of whether users click. It rewards high-traffic websites, making clickbait an effective tool for driving large volumes of views.³

Pay-Per-Click (PPC): A digital advertising model in which advertisers pay each time a user clicks on their ad. This model incentivizes content creators to use compelling headlines (like clickbait) to increase click-through rates and drive traffic to monetized pages.³

Engagement Metrics: Measurable user interactions with content, such as clicks, shares, comments, and time spent on a page. These metrics influence how content is ranked by algorithms and are often manipulated using clickbait strategies to boost visibility.³

Content Farms: Organizations or websites that produce large volumes of low-quality, SEO-optimized articles designed to attract ad revenue. They frequently rely on clickbait headlines to maximize clicks and profit with minimal journalistic integrity.⁴

Although the term “clickbait” implies a headline that’s clicked on, the origin of the phenomenon is often traced back to practices in 19th-century print journalism—specifically, the “yellow journalism” era of the 1890s. Newspapers like The New York World, run by Joseph Pulitzer, and The New York Journal, run by William Randolph Hearst, used sensational headlines to boost circulation. These headlines were often exaggerated or dramatized news stories to outcompete rival newspapers—sound familiar? Even earlier than this, techniques like penny press marketing in the 1830s used shocking crime stories or human-interest angles to sell cheap newspapers to the masses. Although there was no clicking involved, these organizations capitalized on the same psychological triggers that modern clickbait does: curiosity, fear, outrage, and novelty.⁵

When the news world transitioned to an increasingly digital format with the rise of the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the initial advertising strategies stayed roughly the same. In print newspapers and the early web era, ads were sold primarily on a cost-per-impression (CPM) basis, meaning publishers were paid for simply showing ads. However, as the popularity of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising models began to rise, the focus shifted away from creating quality impressions to raw traffic volume.³ Obviously, this new advertising model, which tracked clicks (or any type of online engagement with the ads), was only possible in the world of digital media, and as the accessibility of the internet boomed, so did the opportunities for ad revenue, affiliate commission, and data collection. The success of companies like Google and Facebook’s PPC ad structures encouraged more outlets to adopt this method, and the focus for many publishers shifted from generating quality content to increasing raw traffic volume.³ 

Some of the earliest examples of digital clickbait havens include websites like BuzzFeed, Upworthy, and The Huffington Post. They often used the same infamous formulas for crafting titles that we still see plastered over the internet today. This includes lines like: “You won’t believe what happened next...”, “This one weird trick…”, or (my personal favorite) “Doctors hate her for this reason…” These types of headlines exploit what behavioral scientists often call the curiosity gap, a phenomenon that explains the difference between what a person knows and what they want or need to know.¹ 

Today, the legacy of clickbait lives on, not only in sensational headlines on actual news sites but also in increasingly absurd YouTube thumbnails, social media hooks, and the captions of Instagram Reels or TikTok videos. As platforms struggle with how to regulate (or even define and identify) clickbait, creators continue to churn out content that produces a high click-through rate, often at the expense of quality and accuracy. 

Joseph Pulitzer

A Hungarian-American politician and pioneering newspaper publisher of The New York World in the late 19th century, who played a key role in the rise of sensationalist journalism. His use of bold headlines, emotional appeals, and scandal-driven stories laid the groundwork for what would later evolve into modern clickbait tactics.⁵

William Randolph Hearst

A powerful media mogul and, as publisher of The New York Journal, Pulitzer’s main rival, known for amplifying sensationalism in journalism to boost newspaper sales. His aggressive use of provocative headlines and emotionally charged stories helped define the era of yellow journalism, a direct precursor to today’s clickbait strategies.⁵

Ben Smith

An American journalist and editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed News from 2011 to 2020. In 2014, Smith faced public backlash when Buzzfeed was accused of relying on clickbait tactics, but Smith publicly defended their strategies, including writing a Buzzfeed article on why they don’t use clickbait.⁶ 

Eli Pariser

An author and editor who gained notoriety as a viral content editor for Upworthy, where he consistently drove massive traffic through highly clickable headlines. His success highlighted how emotionally evocative or curiosity-inducing content could outperform traditional journalism in the digital economy.⁷

In an age of disinformation and a constant stream of content available at our fingertips, clickbait has the power to lead us down never-ending rabbit holes, searching for the end to a punchline (or headline) that may not even exist. This makes its persistent existence confusing, but there are explanations for the who, what, where, why, and how of clickbait. 

How do Companies Benefit from Clickbait? 

Why are so many publishers continuing to pump out ridiculous clickbait content when we all know it’s worthless? Companies benefit from clickbait because it grabs our attention—which is highly valuable in and of itself. The revenue of online publishers, brands, and content creators depends on engagement metrics like page views since advertising models usually pay based on traffic volume. Even if people are disappointed with what they find after clicking on the article or video, the creator has already succeeded, because they’ve gotten more eyeballs on the ads that make them money.¹ On the flip side, some creators who want to establish themselves or create a loyal following are careful to avoid overusing clickbait tactics, lest their viewers get overly annoyed with the misleading hooks and ditch the site altogether.² 

Who is Making these Crazy Stories, and Who Actually Reads Them?

Clickbait content comes from a variety of sources. Sometimes that means large media companies or content farms optimizing for ad revenue and viral traffic, but it can also be smaller influencers or advertisers trying to pull in new viewers. In some cases, even reputable news outlets resort to clickbait tactics to compete in our saturated digital landscape.¹ In a world overrun with fake news and endless scrolling options, algorithms reward engagement over accuracy. Even though many organizations continue to value high-quality, well-researched, and accurate information, it can be tempting to incorporate some of these tactics to stay relevant in a world where users’ attention is easily lost. 

The audience for clickbait is equally broad: research shows that everyone—regardless of age, gender, race, education, or media literacy—is susceptible to curiosity-driven clicks.^3,8 However, studies suggest that younger audiences, and especially heavy social media users and people with lower trust in the “traditional media," are particularly likely to engage with clickbait content.^3,8 You may know people who distrust major news sites or think that journalists are too skewed by political bias. Their fear of fake news may ironically drive them toward more obscure and less reputable sites, which can feed them harmful misinformation. In many ways, clickbait is a product of the modern attention economy, created by businesses that need traffic and sustained by readers whose biases make these headlines almost impossible to resist.⁸

Psychological Underpinnings of Clickbait

Now that we’ve established the who, what, where, and why of clickbait’s existence, it’s time to delve into the how—how has clickbait withstood the test of time, and how does it work? These wacky articles and links thrive because they tap into many of our evolved human tendencies. For example, the negativity bias explains why we’re more likely to click on content framed around threats, danger, or controversy. Have you ever noticed how clickbait often focuses on the “worst” things for your health, or the newest list of the “most dangerous” places, or the “most horrific” thing someone found in their soup... Research shows that people are more likely to engage with negative headlines than positive ones, and obviously, publishers have caught onto this, usually exaggerating any potential negative finding and generating misleading headlines that intend to spark fear. What’s more, our fixation on negative news extends to how we read and share news with others, as we often amplify the negativity of the news by using more negative terms or introducing new negative language.⁹ 

The second strategy clickbait creators employ is to create a social comparison. Titles might sound something like “Here are the 7 things you didn’t know you were doing wrong” or even “You’ve been missing out on this one weird trick.” These titles hint at some insider knowledge or exclusivity that can trigger readers’ fear of missing out. We are, after all, social creatures, and no one likes the feeling of being the only one left out of a secret.^9,10 

Clickbait also capitalizes on emotional arousal, as the stronger the emotional reaction (with clickbait, it’s often anger, disgust, or surprise), the more likely we are to engage. This is likely why clickbait titles often include shocking and emotionally-charged headlines. One study that used both an emotional-response questionnaire and a pupil-dilation tracking software found that clickbait headlines generate a higher level of emotional arousal than more neutral headlines. They found that emotional arousal indeed appears to be a significant predictor of intention to read news (or in this case, to click on articles that end up providing very little in the way of actual news).¹⁰ 

As mentioned, we’re uncomfortable with unresolved mysteries—that’s why the information gap and curiosity gap theories can be so compelling. When headlines use superlatives, intensifiers, and “definite referring expressions,” which often imply that the thing being talked about is the only one of its kind, readers tend to fill in the blanks in their minds.¹ Even though the title provides no actual context for what’s being discussed, research on these problematic headlines finds that viewers end up constructing their own ideas of what will be covered. They end up clicking on these links with the expectation that they’ll not only find relevant information about what they think the article or video will be about, but also that they’ve somehow found new and groundbreaking insights on the imagined topic.¹ 

This all mirrors evolutionary tendencies for survival, as we’re wired to pay attention to potentially vital or threatening information.¹ Perhaps that’s why those articles about “The thing in your water that’s been poisoning you...” are so intriguing. 

The rise of clickbait has sparked ongoing debate about responsibility, ethics, and regulation. As misleading headlines influence public opinion and politics, the question remains: who’s to blame?

You Won’t Believe That This is Actually Clickbait... 

In order to regulate something, we must first clearly define it. For some articles, it feels easy to identify potential clickbait, but other times, clickbait is less straightforward. In 2014, BuzzFeed was in hot water over the number of headlines they’d been publishing with eye-catching titles that resembled clickbait.⁶ Even now, when you visit their webpage, you’ll see headlines like “15 Funny Tweets From People Who Just Learned The Truth About Credit Karma Scores.” This real title, for example, checks a lot of the boxes. It promises emotional engagement (that it will be funny), nags at the curiosity gap (what are the tweets? What is the truth about Credit Karma scores?), leverages social comparison (what do all of these other people know that I don’t?), and even potentially invokes the negativity bias (surely the truth about Credit Karma scores must be bad, right?). 

But according to Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith, this title wouldn’t be considered clickbait if it were to actually give out 15 funny tweets and the truth about Credit Karma scores. Smith defined clickbait as a headline that is dishonest about the content of the article and noted that one of their popular pieces at the time, "A 5-Year-Old Girl Raised Enough Money To Take Her Father Who Has Terminal Cancer To Disney World," delivered exactly what the headline promised.⁶ 

Meanwhile, some researchers give an even looser definition, such as: “Clickbait is an editorial technique of writing headlines and snippets that direct users to websites.” Surely, this isn’t always problematic, right? Isn’t that the job of all publications, to get people to read the published pieces? The effects are also confusing; many researchers imply that clickbait titles lower credibility, and while this may seem intuitive, the results don’t actually demonstrate this. People are often more likely to click on these links, and although they go into the source slightly more skeptically, there is no strong evidence supporting the idea that their perceptions of these links are negative.⁸ 

Viral Fake News Stories Outperform Real News 

Despite the almost unbelievable level of drama, shock, and awe coming from real-world current events in the last decade, people are still more drawn to fake news than the truth. Although Buzzfeed is known for having engaged in some questionable headlining tactics, the news site has also conducted some valuable research comparing readership across a variety of publications.¹¹ 

In the final three months of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Buzzfeed tracked the top 20 fake news stories about the election from hoax news sites and compared the viewership to the top 20 election stories from major news networks. They found that, although the public had previously interacted with real news from reputable sources more often than clickbait and fake news, in the last three months of the election there was a boom in clickbait and election misinformation, and the amount of views, clicks, likes, and shares of fake news stories surpassed the engagement with real election coverage. The most-engaged-with pieces were now coming from hyperpartisan and fake news sites.¹¹

What’s more, these fake news pieces came with a clear bias; the top stories were disproportionately pro-Donald Trump and anti-Hillary Clinton.¹¹ You may remember some of the blatantly false claims proliferated by top fake news sites, like that the pope had endorsed Trump or that Hillary Clinton had sold weapons to ISIS. Out of the top 20 stories, only three didn’t overtly fall into this pro-Trump category. The results of the 2016 election, combined with the popularity of such viral misinformation, highlight the potential impact of fake news and clickbait on events as meaningful as political outcomes. In the wake of this study, Facebook came under public scrutiny as people demanded it crack down on the spread of these types of clickbait articles.¹¹

The controversy then lends itself to the question of fault: who is responsible for regulating the spread of misinformation? Is it only the publishers who write the fake news stories, or do the platforms like Facebook that help promote clickbait play a role in the issue? Although these types of questions are part of an ongoing debate around free speech and personal freedom in the tech age, platforms like Facebook and YouTube have claimed to have adapted their algorithms to disincentivize obvious clickbait stories. For example, Facebook has stated that they will flag posts that contain obvious misinformation, and that they’ve created a task force to tackle the issue.¹¹ At present, there still seems to be a slough of clickbait on every major social media platform, including Facebook. 

Counteracting Clickbait 

So, how does one avoid falling into the carefully laid traps set by clickbait? The first bit of advice, relevant to avoiding all misinformation, is to be a critical consumer. Before clicking, consider whether a headline seems too sensational or unrealistic to be true. Not everything that’s shocking is false, but you should be especially cautious when you’ve stumbled upon something that seems extra preposterous. 

If you’ve found an article or video that has caught your attention but you’re still not sure whether to trust it, check the source. Look for reputable news sources and avoid clicking on links from unknown or untrusted websites. It’s unlikely that a website you’ve never heard of, written by someone without any credentials, will be the first to publish a groundbreaking news story on something as monumental as a major political scandal or global health crisis.³ 

Lastly, don’t be part of the problem. Don't share content without first verifying its accuracy and context. It helps to read the full article or watch the full video before you send it off to friends and family. Not only do most people fail to complete this crucial step, but one study found that 75% of forwarded news links from social media aren’t even clicked on by the original sender!¹² Everyone makes mistakes, and we’re all vulnerable to being deceived, but make sure you know that what you’ve read (or think you’re going to read) is real before you start telling others about it. Whenever possible, choose to support media outlets that prioritize quality journalism and avoid clickbait tactics.³

The Macedonian Fake News Farms

The results of the 2016 US presidential election altered much of the world at the time, and we continue to be globally impacted by the initial election of Donald Trump. But even leading up to the election, much of the world was deeply involved in the election process. As previously discussed, Americans were exposed to an onslaught of disinformation on social media. One study from Cambridge University found that, strangely enough, many of the most viral posts originated from a small town in central North Macedonia called Veles. It appeared that the key player in this fake news operation was a man named Mirko Ceselkoski, who specializes in social media and even gives courses on spreading viral disinformation.⁴ 

The researchers who traveled to Macedonia to try to understand this phenomenon found that Ceselkoski’s courses on digital marketing had reached hundreds of people, mostly teens in Macedonia, and thus his influence had become highly widespread. The economic hardship many of these Macedonian young adults were facing led them to capitalize on the potentially lucrative work of creating clickbait news articles that would draw in frustrated and sometimes naive conservative Americans.⁴  

Some sources suggest that some prominent American conservatives themselves may have influenced Ceselkoski and these groups or “farms” of teens mass-producing conservative clickbait, encouraging them to churn out additional pro-Trump propaganda in the final stretch of the election. Although the Macedonians who were interviewed deny it, the Cambridge researchers also hypothesize that the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) may have manipulated the groups in North Macedonia, encouraging their efforts to interfere with the U.S. election.⁴

The Upward Trajectory of Upworthy (and Its Downfall)

It’s rare to find someone who appreciates the negativity bias of traditional news media. More often, we hear our friends and coworkers bemoan the depressing nature of our newsfeeds. I’ve had friends claim to be so disheartened by the news that they have started to avoid it altogether. This is where the media site Upworthy stepped in: in 2012, the site capitalized on social media users’ negativity burnout, promising to share only uplifting stories. A year and a half after its inception, the site was already one of the fastest-growing media sites of the time, with its content bringing in almost 90 million people every month.⁷ 

You’ve probably encountered a few Upworthy headlines on your Instagram or Facebook feed. As of writing, the top stories on their main page are titled “Her Husband Mysteriously Brought Home Bananas and Tuna, then She Found the Note Explaining Why,” “Airbnb Host Ditches Cleaning Fee and Finds Unexpected Benefits,” and “People Reveal Their ‘Stupidly Expensive’ Purchases that were Worth Every Penny.” All of these headlines seem to promise some sort of earth-shattering revelation only discernible by clicking on the link to the article (spoiler alert, the husband was trying to buy foods to support his wife’s menstrual cycle, people left the airbnb cleaner when they weren’t directly paying cleaning fees, and the best purchases are apparently... good socks, bras, and a mattress?) 

Although the clickbait titles that amplify our curiosity gap and reel us in with the possibility of a major secret reveal are now commonplace, these dramatic phrases seemed to lead the pack in clickbait content before the rest of the internet was bombarded with such lines. Even though Upworthy’s content seemed to reach peak virality in mere months after launching, most of their articles were promoted on Facebook, which had started to adjust its algorithms based on how long people spent on the site after following the affiliate links.⁷ 

Since most of Upworthy’s content is essentially clickbait, promising content it never quite delivers on (or at least, content that isn’t quite as monumental as it implies), Facebook users usually clicked on the links to the articles but then spent only short amounts of time on the Upworthy site, leading the algorithm to stop suggesting their content as frequently, and causing the Upworthy traffic numbers to come crashing back down just as quickly as they’d risen, plummeting to less than a quarter of the viewers they’d had at their peak.⁷  

Upworthy’s content and the Facebook algorithm’s response to these sensational headlines don’t accurately portray the trajectory of most fake news on social media. Instead, the instant virality of these clickbait articles, as well as their inability to sustain long term success, reminds us how quickly newsfeeds can change, especially when the content we’re exposed to is filtered through social media platforms like Facebook, who ultimately care less about the quality of the content we’re being fed and more about capturing our attention for longer.

The Misinformation Mitigation Toolbox: Dismantling the Digital Deceit 

Clickbait often includes wildly misleading or entirely inaccurate information. Cutting through this noise can be challenging. This article uses techniques identified by misinformation researchers to suggest nine behavioral interventions, grouped under three strategic approaches, which you can use to steer clear of online deceit. 

A New Spin on Misinformation 

Not all misinformation impacts us at the same level. Our research team at The Decision Lab identified and organized the different types of misinformation into a taxonomy tool called Sorting Potentially Inaccurate Narratives (SPIN), with the goal of helping both individuals and organizations combat misinformation to make the best decisions possible. Read more about the concept and its application. 

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11. Silverman, C. (2016, November 17). This analysis shows how viral fake election news stories outperformed real news on Facebook. BuzzFeed News. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook 
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