# Clickbait is a necessary evil Clickbait is a term primarily used in a pejorative way to describe a headline or thumbnail which crudely attempts to make you click on it to read the rest of an often uninteresting article (see [[The Internet is addictive]]). That is why everyone claims to hate it, and duly so. However, clickbait is all over the web for a good reason: *because it works*. In the YouTube jungle, the success of content creators is measured by two metrics: watch time and click-through rate. Watch time is mostly influenced by the quality of the video itself, but a user only watches a video if he is impelled to click on it. That is why clickbait is so important: a good video packaging can drastically change the virality of a video, triggering a positive feedback loop: users click on the video, so its click-through rate skyrockets, so the YouTube algorithm recommends it to more users, who themselves click on the video… Furthermore, clickbaity titles and thumbnails need not be deceiving. On the contrary, Derek Muller, creator of the Veritasium channel,[^1] found out that, more often than not, successful packaging delivered more information to a broader audience on average, either because it described the video's content more accurately or because it used more understandable terms (eg *Basketball dropped off a dam* instead of *Magnus effect*). --- ## 📚 References [^1]: Veritasium. [_Clickbait Is Unreasonably Effective_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng). *YouTube*.