Today I read an article on TechCrunch, announcing that Facebook has (further) waged war on websites that post inaccurate/exaggerated link headlines.
You know the ones I mean, they pop up all over your news feed with titles like ‘This person heard a noise in their washing machine, you wouldn’t believe what happens next!’ and ‘A woman went to the toilet and couldn’t believe what she found!’ and when you do click it, it is in fact just spam, a click-inciting gallery or often at best, a waste of your time. The TechCrunch article states that clickbait is one of the most complained about elements of a person’s Facebook news feed. I can certainly agree with that.
In response, Facebook has created an algorithm that buries these clickbait headlines so they don’t appear on your feed anymore – hurrah! The algorithm looks for phrases often used in clickbait headlines (the ‘OMG you wouldn’t believe it!’ types) – but not in legitimate headlines and then scores the article on how ‘clickbaity’ it is. If an article gets a high score the algorithm punishes the website the story links to/the page that shared it, by making all of its other posts/referral links less visible. OUCH, this algorithm is sassy.
Facebook’s VP of Product Management on News Feed, Adam Mosseri, told Josh Constine from TechCrunch, “if you post 50 times a day and post one piece a clickbait, this shouldn’t affect you. If you’re a spammer and post clickbait all day, this should affect you a lot.” He goes on to state that if a website stops its ‘clickbaity’ ways, its referral traffic will improve and consequently its visibility on Facebook.
Facebook has stated that they are very happy to help other social networks adopt an anti-clickbait algorithm, however they won’t be sharing the specific guidelines it uses to identify a clickbait site because then these websites will know how to get around the ban, smart thinking.
So what does this mean for digital publications?
Well, a lot. Not only because Facebook is the most used social network on the planet, but because it demonstrates how digital publishing (and digital marketing, by extension) is evolving and I’m confident it won’t be long before other platforms adopt the same sort of anti-clickbait system. Media outlets will now have to rely on genuinely informative and/or interesting content to attract and keep readers, which in turn should result in more informed and generally better journalism.
I read recently a string of tweets and subsequent stories from an ex-reporter at a local newspaper in London (all here: http://www.sub-scribe.co.uk/2016/08/gareth-davies-why-trinity-mirror-model.html), who was venting his frustration at the state of local journalism, and how reporting even in print media had reverted to ‘clickbaity listicles’. Personally, I think this algorithm and stance against this type of publishing couldn’t have come at a better time. Hopefully it will fix the misinformed value attributed to ‘clicks’ in digital publishing.
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