Discover the shocking secrets of clickbait!
Five fool-proof hacks to transform your craft overnight
The genre of the twenty-first century
Isn’t it outrageous that MFAs and creative writing courses don’t teach students the rudiments of the Art of Clickbait? So much importance is now given to solipsistic micro-genres like the misery memoir, autofiction [sic], or the personal essay (whatever that is), that educators are neglecting what is without a hint of doubt the genre of our era. If the nineteenth century was the century of the realist novel (cue Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, et al), and the twentieth century was about literary experimentation and avant-gardism (from James Joyce to Georges Perec, passing through Gertrude Stein and Marguerite Duras, to B. S. Johnson and Anaïs Nin), ours is the era of the clickbaity piece, as popularised by a myriad of anonymous and renowned talents.
That clickbait isn’t taught to creative writing students is a dereliction of duty, not only from an artistic point of view, but more importantly because clickbait is more or less the only genre that can still make a writer some money. At least until AI starts churning out decent copy — and I can’t wait for this to happen — writing clickbait is a relatively easy way to secure a regular income putting words on a page, if you rather make money writing than in less degrading ways. If you don’t believe me, check your favourite newspaper and see how much of what is published day in, day out reeks of clickbait. When it comes to the opinion pages you’ll not only spot clickbait without any effort, but you’ll struggle to find anything that isn’t written to hook you and treat you like an absolute moron.
OK, I’m exaggerating — in my defence, this is a piece about clickbait. But you’re right: not everything is clickbait; not yet. Still, do have a butcher’s at some of the columns in this week’s Grauniad’s1 harrowing “Lifestyle” section. This is supposed to be a serious publication, the go-to source for the Global Enlightened Liberati, and yet these pieces are lying in wait, ready to catch you off guard while you unsuspectingly attend to your informational needs:
“A moment that changed me: I’m 58 and single since 1997. A Sex and the City meme transformed my life,” Bibi Lynch2
“Youth-free dining: Does banning men under 35 really make a restaurant sexier?”, anonymous
“The hot rodent boyfriend: why gen Z has gone wild for ‘sexy rat’ guys”, anonymous
Each one of these pieces is an invitation to bite the worm and swallow the hook, line, and sinker. Not only that — they are also an invitation for a certain demographic — in this case young and middle-aged men — to hate-read and hate-share. And the Grauniad isn’t even the worst clickbait factory of them all. If you hold your nose and dive into the stinking and overflowing cesspit that is the British gutter press, that’s where you’ll find the worst offenders, making your reactionary uncle and aunt angry about woke shenanigans. And yet, even considering the ideological differences clickbait follows more or less the same rules.
Here I want to provide five very simple steps for you to up your clickbait game and pay your student debt doing what you love: writing miasmatic copy.
Revealed! The secret to writing dumpster-grade clickbait!
The examples I presented above, as explained, are rather sophisticated forms of clickbait. But I want to start with what could be termed “dumpster-grade” clickbait. This is the lowest form of clickbait, which also means it is clickbait in its purest, unadulterated form. Of course, every aspiring clickbait artist dreams of one day being able to pen artsy fartsy clickbait for the Graniaud and other respectable broadsheets, but if you don’t get the basics right you won’t even make it to Buzzfeed.
So here, without further ado, are the hacks that will get you churning out those irritating pieces like a pro!
Write a dishonest headline. Dumpster-grade clickbait is mainly about the headline. The headline has to create a sense of urgency, address the reader directly, invoke the fear of missing out (FOMO), use exclamation marks, and if possible tease with a listicle. The more sensationalist the better. Most people will only read the headline and then hate-share the piece, so you might as well give it your one hundred percent.
Exploit popular controversies. Tap into current debates or scandals, and aim to irritate at least one of the warring factions. Remember that clickbait isn’t about honestly defending an intellectual or ideological position, so you don’t need to believe in what you’re saying. Your goal is to provoke reactions, not provide balanced viewpoints. The so-called Culture Wars are a fertile territory for dumpster-grade clickbait inspiration.
Present rare anecdotes and the most extreme opinions or incidents as norms. For example, you can write a piece on why millennials are all quitting their jobs based on a few isolated cases. Or, claim that “Most Gen Z is identifying as non-binary now!" despite minimal evidence. Or just pick the worst possible person you can find in any demographic you want to attack, and portray them as representative of said group of people. The key is to make the unusual seem usual, reducing positions to their extremes. Cue the headline above regarding “The hot rodent boyfriend…”
Be pedagogical and patronizing. You need to treat the reader like a fool, which is probably fair, since no one relatively wise would willingly read clickbait. Remember to promise easy solutions and epiphanic revelations. Make it sound like you have the ultimate key to a certain topic, and that only you can unlock it. It doesn’t matter if what the reader finds is a box full of turds. The point is to unlock something.
Be crafty and infantile with your use of language. Liberally use buzzwords and phrases that trigger curiosity, not just in your headline but throughout the clickbait piece. Words like “shocking”, “mind-blowing”, “unbelievable”, and so on, are a good place to start. Pretend that you are a not-so-bright fourteen-year old writing for other dim fourteen-year olds. And pretend that you are excited about what you’re writing about, even if you can no longer look at yourself in the mirror out of shame.
These above are the basic points every dumpster-grade clickbait piece should cover. If you start working from them, and then tweak as required here and there, you’ll be writing for the broadsheets before you realise it. And once up there, once you’ve made it to the Grauniad’s Lifestyle pages, here’s a top tip for you, so that you sound like an old member of the clickbait gang. One favoured trick deployed by highbrow clickbait writers and editors is what I call the Cretin’s Dash. This entails the use of two clauses, the second one pedagogically building on the first one, in the most annoying way possible — top marks for using the phrase “here’s why”:
You are wrong about X — here’s why3
You enjoy activity X — here’s why you should feel guilty about it4
I quit the X Party — here’s why5
I moved out of London — here’s why6
Something that shouldn’t interest anyone at all, but I’ll still write about it because I need to pay my bills — here’s why7
And so on…
Groundbreaking! How to read clickbait!
You don’t. You don’t read clickbait.
Just log off, go for a walk, or do something productive — like scrubbing the limescale off your bathtub with an old toothbrush, or ungluing the chewing gum from the pavement outside your house with a spatula. Life’s too short to read pieces like this one. Don’t you have any self-respect?
If you are reading this from outside of the UK, you might not know I’m talking about the Guardian. In the 1970s the broadsheet was baptised as the Grauniad by British satirical magazine Private Eye, due to the former’s frequent typographical errors.
I don’t know if it’s a coincidence, but a lot of clickbait artists don four letter names…
“Everything about America’s gun debate is wrong – here’s why,” Abené Clayton and Lois Beckett.
“The Labour party is in my blood. Here’s why I’ve just cancelled my membership,” Owen Jones. Few people have been more damaging to the collective intellect of the British left than Owen “The Opinionator” Jones, but in all fairness at least here he hasn’t deployed the Cretin’s Dash.
“I didn’t learn to drive until I was 30 — here’s why,” Coco Khan.
One day click-baitery and sociopathy studies will be linked!
Love your clickbait titles and headlines for this article!