Why do so many YouTubers give their videos obnoxious clickbait titles, along with ridiculous over-the-top thumbnails with tears, gaping mouths, fake enthusiasm and glaring frowns?

There’s a reason for the stupid.

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When you don’t give your YouTube video a really zippy title, it doesn’t get clicks – and then the algorithms don’t promote it.

What this means is that you might have a great video, yet it never “catches” and you only make a couple of dollars for a day’s worth of work. This is why most YouTubers (including myself) name their videos something that makes you feel drawn to click, then give it a crazy thumbnail. Something like: “I can’t STAND it when THIS Happens!!!” (thumbnail image of man yelling with his hands on his head, next to a giant question mark.)

YouTube will promote your video if it catches in the first couple of days. If it doesn’t, it stops being pushed and it gets lost in the past like old receipts in the back of a battered filing cabinet.

As much as people claim to “hate clickbait,” enough people click on it to boost the algorithm and reinforce the “need” for clickbait titles.

The Accidental Clickbait Test

I have seen clickbait work.

As a complete joke, my eldest son and I once titled a video on planting pumpkins “FARMERS HATE HIM! This WEIRD TRICK lets YOU grow TONS of Food (Literal TONS!) HINT: IT’S NOT COUPONS”

The video is a 37-minute long video of us digging pumpkin pits and putting chicken guts in them then planting, with various entertaining interludes along the way. Thus far, it has received 512,415 views and gained my channel over 4,600 subscribers.

That sure taught us something about just how powerful clickbait can be. Even if it was done as an obnoxious joke!

In contrast, I did a video simply titled “This is how you grow pumpkins!” and it only got 11,000 views and gained 10 subscribers. That is about 1/50th the success of a clickbait video. It made 1/50th the ad revenue as well.

I don’t like it, but I don’t make the rules. I also don’t determine people’s tastes. For some reason, clickbait just works, despite people claiming in the comments that they “don’t click on clickbait” and “will unsubscribe.”

I did this video deliberately over-the-top and it was a massive success.

Since I am not going to make a stupid soyjack face, I found a public domain image of a monkey making the face and put it in the image. 603,000 views, people.

When a clickbait title and/or thumbnail can potentially bring in 50 TIMES the adsense revenue of a non-clickbait title, there is a huge incentive to make clickbait.

Imagine only making $10 on a video instead of $500, because lilsue45 in the comments says she’ll leave if you give your videos clickbait titles…

Most people will just make clickbait titles. And lilsue45 probably isn’t going to leave. And if she does, who cares? You’ve got 100 other people subscribing to you because they watched “MY BUTT Hurt SO BAD after I did THIS at STARBUCKS!”

We live in Idiocracy. And if you don’t play along, you don’t get the fiatbucks and you can’t afford Carl’s Jr.

lilsue45 is just jelly, dawg.

Can This Clickbait Trend Continue?

I do sometimes wonder if we’ve hit peak clickbait.

I have been very tempted to just start naming all my videos things like “Man digging up sweet potatoes,” and “Working in a garden for roughly seven minutes,” and “Standing next to a squash plant and talking about it.” Then I can just let YT pick some random awkward still shot from the video. I’m sure it would kill us on the algorithms, but it would be funny. Anti-clickbait!

I’ve also considered making my videos only black and white.

And filming everything on a 1984 Panasonic VHS Camcorder.

“You WON’T BELIEVE what She Said When She SAW MY CAMERA!”

Personally, I think it’s a race to the bottom now. Attention spans are rapidly decreasing, and short-form videos are becoming major time-wasters. TikTok and Instagram are loaded with fast videos, and YouTub Shorts is attempting to mirror their success. In this clips, it’s not even about the title anymore. It’s about visually capturing the viewer in seconds before he scrolls away. I have made some fast-paced shorts, but do not prefer the medium.

In fact, I don’t prefer long-form video as a medium, either. Books are my preferred way of both receiving and conveying information. Yet book sales continue to fall while online viewing rises.

I don’t see the trend reversing unless we get another Carrington Event.

“We Thought the GRID was SAFE But then THIS Happened!”

As one of my commenters wrote yesterday about clickbait, it’s the “Babylon System.”

If we must use it for views, fine. Just make sure the associated video is at least entertaining and/or useful to your viewers.

If not, lilsue45 is REALLY gonna be ticked.