Clickbait and AdSense
As society progresses to a more technologically dependent state, and in the context of the social media age, interdisciplinary research is required to understand the varying ramifications of such a transition. Specifically, clickbait has run rampant. It has been the result of click-through incentives: the pay-per-click algorithm that generates revenue for advertisers. Yet, consequently, this algorithmic model has had dangerous implications for tech companies and their users alike.
As the AdSense algorithm used by search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing was introduced, the trend of clickbait simultaneously broke through. To fully understand and operationalize click baiting trends, it is necessary to define the underlying intentions and goals of those that make clickbait. User interaction has also been shaped by clickbait, following content that has more ostentatious thumbnails, graphics, and titles. Clickbait has flooded social media apps, and companies have had to change algorithms to lessen its negative effects. More research is needed to fully understand the psychological aspects of clickbait as well as to contain the issue’s impact on consumers.
Martin Potthast, Tim Gollub, Kristof Komlossy, Sebastian Schuster, Matti Wiegmann, Erika Patricia Garces Fernandez, Matthias Hagen, and Benno Stein. 2018. Crowdsourcing a Large Corpus of Clickbait on Twitter. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 1498–1507, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.