Clickbait is Unreasonably Effective

YouTube allowing creators to change Title and Thumbnails as many times as they want after a video has been uploaded, and providing realtime analytics after a change is what is driving this. They basically are constantly optimizing, until they find what sticks. The crap you describe obviously does very well. Veritasium does a great video on this. [VIDEO]

Actually, Veritasium posted a brilliant way for optimizing thumbnails and headlines to improve click-through rate on Youtube: [VIDEO] I plead guilty and say that I've repeatedly posted the same link on HN but with different query parameters to understand its performance. But I've come to understand that users will notice this behavior and start to generally downvote. As a creator with a small audience, the only success with tapping into a high throughput feedback loop has been by painstakingly write articles and submit them one by one to HN. I've gotten much better at it already and frankly I've also noticed that engagement and "likes" isn't everything either. I've realized too that if you truly do what you believe in consistently, I've found that I suddenly start having "impact", which I think is different from engagement. How I see it: - Engagement: clicks, views, comments - Impact: The world changes, there's consequences and substantial changes as a reaction But I think you can't have one without the other. High engagement means you're a popstar. High impact means you're a politician. Ideally, I want to be able to pick my position on the gradient.

Derek of Veritaseum made a video laying out why "clickbait-y" titles like that are necessary, and I feel like it makes a pretty good case. [VIDEO] The tl;dw is that the most effective titles come right up against the edge of what an average target audience member would consider unacceptable on the axes of withheld information (to create a curiosity gap) and misleading sensationalism (to maximise the perceived importance of the topic); and you have to play the game of having effective titles because otherwise no one clicks on your video and it stops being recommended to people who would find it valuable.

Take a look at Veritasium's perspective on this issue [1]. Veritasium reflects on clickbait thumbnails from the content producer perspective, and balances that against the motivation behind YouTube's algorithms. His final conclusion is that cilckbait isn't all bad, and that it serves an important purpose for both viewers and content creators. His classification of clickbait into different types is also fascinating. [1] [VIDEO]

The video in question for reference: [VIDEO] Interestingly, when I saw that I figured this channel for a goner because he was going to turn to the darkside, but quite contrary to expectations I feel like his channel has actually blossomed since then. His older videos are fine, but often just explaining concepts that you can find a lot of other explanations on, but some of his recent videos have rocked the boat even among physicists and IMHO he was ultimately proved to be correct for them. I particularly point at his videos about how nobody has measured the one-way speed of light ( [LINK] ), which was well-known among people very very deep in the field of relativity but not very well known outside of that (even amongst physicists in other fields, let alone lay people) and the electricity videos he's done in the last year ( [LINK] , [LINK] ) which attracted a whole whackload of "debunking" videos, which were themselves wrong (the best "bunking" video, if I may call it that, is probably AlphaPheonix's: [LINK] , since he actually set up the experiment, albeit on a smaller scale). They aren't all of that caliber, but the knot theory video was very good too and not something I've seen a hundred times elsewhere, and the airships video that preceded that one clearly had a high degree of research put into it beyond just the hype.

Veritasium talks about thumbnail and title experimentation on YouTube, and argues for the need to do so on platforms that surface up and recommend content to users: [VIDEO]

Veritasium did a video about this recently, actually. I got the picture and didn't finish it, but it helped me realize how YouTube has pushed junk to me, despite trying to subscribe to quality channels. [VIDEO]

I think this is the same argument made by Veritasium - poorly summarized: do whatever it takes to hook people in that have never heard the topic before, then teach them something new. [VIDEO]