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Right. "They ruining the web" for us but apparently they are providing value to someone else.
by johnward 10y ago
Right. "They ruining the web" for us but apparently they are providing value to someone else.
- criley2 10y agoClickbait is like heroin. Just because people use it so much it kills them doesn't mean it provides value to them. Just because clickbait preys on our nature doesn't make it valuable. Easy to argue that by choosing manipulation over substance for the sole reason of generating revenue that you are not providing value, you are more of a rent seeker, not providing anything new of value but rather seeking rents on existing content. Seeing as most clickbait is "Top 10 Things Our Underpaid Interns Stole From Other Sites: You won't believe #7!", the rent seeking analogy is kinda decent.
- johnward 10y agoMaybe "value" wasn't the right word. I would hope that these types of things would fail because the users would give up clicking through 20 pages of ads but the fact that "respected" outlets like Forbes still do it suggests otherwise.