Clickbait

"[10] Dictionary.com states that clickbait is "a sensationalized headline or piece of text on the Internet designed to entice people to follow a link to an article on another web page.

[15][16] One cause of such sensational stories is the controversial practice called checkbook journalism, where news reporters pay sources for their information without verifying its truth.

In the U.S. it is generally considered an unethical practice, as it often turns celebrities and politicians into lucrative targets of unproven allegations.

[17] According to Washington Post writer Howard Kurtz, "this thriving tabloid culture has erased the old definitions of news by including tawdry and sensational stories about celebrities for the sake of profit.

Katherine Viner, editor-in-chief at The Guardian wrote that "chasing down cheap clicks at the expense of accuracy and veracity" undermined the value of journalism and truth.

[21] Emotional subjects with stark headlines are widely shared and clicked, which resulted in what Slate described as an "aggregation of outrage" and a proliferation of websites across the political spectrum – including Breitbart News, Huffington Post, Salon, Townhall and the Gawker Media blogs – which profited by producing shareable short-form pieces offering simple moral judgements on political and cultural issues.

[23] There are various clickbait strategies, including the composition of headlines of news and online articles that build suspense and sensation, luring and teasing users to click.

At the International Consumer Electronics Show, YouTube revealed that most of the videos watched and watch-time generated did not come from Google searches, but from personalized advertisements and the recommendations page.

Clickbait-reporting browser plug-ins[36] have also been developed by the research community in order to report clickbait links for further advances in the field based on supervised learning algorithms.