Clickbait

Fictional examples of "chumbox" style adverts, employing common clickbait tactics of using an information gap to encourage reader curiosity, and promising easy-to-read numbered lists

Very often, there are links on World Wide Web that are there to attract attention. The idea is to make the user click on the link and access the content behind it. Very often these links are then deceptive, sensationalized, dishonest or otherwise misleading. This is known as clickbait. Usually, there is a teaser. This teaser provides just enough information to make people want to click on the link, but not enough to satisfy their curiosity. Clickbait headlines often add an element of dishonesty, using enticements that do not accurately reflect the content being delivered. The "-bait" suffix makes an analogy with fishing, where a hook is disguised by an enticement (bait), presenting the impression to the fish that it is a desirable thing to swallow.

Before the Internet, there was a marketing practice known as bait-and-switch. It used similar dishonest methods to hook customers. In extreme degree, like bait-and-switch, clickbait is a form of fraud. (Click fraud, however, is a separate form of online misrepresentation which uses a more extreme disconnect between what is being presented in the frontside of the link versus what is on the click-through side of the link, also encompassing malicious code.) The term clickbait does not cover for all cases where the user arrives at a destination that is not anticipated from the link that is clicked.

Usually, the content behind a clickbait are simillar to simple lists (so called listicles). This is very low-class journalism. The idea behind a clickbait is to make more users access certain websites.