I sensed in my teenage years that writing was trying to manipulate me. In college, I studied communication, and a class in advertising confirmed my suspicion: they were out to get me. I wasn’t being paranoid. And this was forty years ago. Now, with the Internet, those manipulative tactics are on steroids, with a zillion more pages trying to temp eyeballs.
I’ve since learned more of the inner-workings of the world of influence from my wife, who works in online marketing. She’s schooled in the science of it and is similarly attuned to the way writing is used as a tool to grab attention and press people to action. For the first ten years of the Internet few could figure out a way to make money off it. Advertising is what pulled the world out of the Dot Com bust, and is what created the modern Internet.
The trick was finding a way to quantify everything, to measure how effective advertising was. And the Internet – the series of tubes, offered a great deal more measurability than a billboard. It was now possible to build software programs to test how people reacted in real time. Did they click on it? Did they buy the product? What started as research are now entire markets measuring how people view and navigate websites and pages – where their eyes are drawn, how long they spend on a page, etc.
See: 10 Useful Findings About How People View Web pages
One result of this ability is that major newspapers run different headlines of the same story to see which one gets more response, then go with the best. I often see the same article a day later in the NY Times with a different headline and picture from one I’ve read. I will notice that it doesn’t seem to be exactly the same story, but it is the same topic I was interested in and read about the day before…”Hmm,” I’ll think, “there were two alligator attacks?” I’ll then click and read the first sentence: arrg!
Another tactic shown to work is to use numbers and lists as a way to grab a reader’s attention. People can’t help it; when they see a headline that promises to sum up an entire topic into five or ten bites, they will bite.
- 6 Ways To Better Health
- 8 Signs You’re Not Showing Your Dog Enough Affection
- 7 Minute Workout
- 20 Worlds’ Best Places To Visit
The website Medium is designed to offer readers a wide variety of writers and topics. And all those writers are incentivized to garner clicks, it’s how they get paid. Judging from the list of articles emailed to me today, many have discovered the power of headline numbers. Either because they know it works, or they’re hoping it does, here is a sampling from today’s feed:
- 4 over hyped books not worth your attention
- 5 amazing British shows you probably haven’t seen
- 30 years before Harry Potter another Boy went to Wizarding School
It’s getting to be old hat. I now automatically skip over any headline with numbers the same as other obvious click-bait. But it’s important to note that the comedian’s rule of three is a proven underlying dynamic of the universe. No joke works with two examples: A duck and a penguin are on a plane with only one parachute…