On page 128 Jordan Gold promotes the idea of special “online headlines” that are constructed especially to drive a click from the reader. The headlines are such as “The 10 Things You Should Never Do at Work” (which if you ask me is not so much just an inviting headline as it is an interesting topic) and “Eagles Release ProBowl Linebacker” (which is withholding information to force the curious user to click).
Frankly, I think it’s kind of stupid to use misleading headlines, such as the second example, to “cheat” an extra click from the visitors. Clicks themselves aren’t worth anything, what you want as a website is for people to spend time on the website. Tricking people into unwanted clicks is just inflating the numbers. To me, the only reason that people are measuring clicks and not time spent on sites is that it’s too hard to make an accurate measurement of time spent.
Apart from cheating the numbers (and the advertisers who trust in them) I also think that this practice is a disservice to the website itself. In Sweden we have a website called Aftonbladet.se which is basically an evening paper that’s grown into the biggest news website in Sweden. Up until a while ago they often used very misleading headlines which sometimes had you wondering if you’d clicked the right news item. For me it got so annoying I even stopped visiting the website, because it was just too much work digging through all the rubbish to find what I was really interested in.
On a sidenote, they seem to have changed this practice now, and, if I may guess, their newly introduced user comments functionality may have something to do with it. On the news items with misleading headlines the comments were often filled with angry people bashing the website and its writers (who, coming from an evening paper background, are constantly fighting a reputation of being relatively unserious about journalism and the truth). This may be an interesting example of a website using the community functionality not only as a service to users, but also as a means of communication from its users.
We also spoke briefly about how Gold’s headline conviction contradicts that of Greg Jarboe, whose interview we read last week, and Heather Lloyd-Martin in the second interview we read this week. The two believe that headlines should be constructed to be easily found by search engines, thus to the point and containing keywords relevant to the article.
I think website owners should only worry about the users – provide a good service and people will link your website. If anything, the one thing the Internet does is shift power towards the “little people” – the users. I believe that when you have them, the rest will follow.
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3 comments:
Yes.I agree with what you said. I also had experiences when I clicked a headline and contents were totally different. If headline catches the users' eye, user will satify when there are good article.
I have a friend who work at Online news paper and he is a writer. Online news merits are fast update and realtime feedback from user. There shoud be many articles on website and he has to write many articles everyday even he is not interest in certian area. He can not focus on contents a lot. Only thing he concerns about is number of click of user and number of his articles.
I feel bad for him to work such a company. As Filip said, website should provide a good service and people will link website. Contents are important to hold customers.
I agree with what both of you are saying as a principal. However, all these little trick to get people to click links or visit webpages are used for a simple reason, they actually work. Ofcourse there is a limit you shouldn't cross. If you continusly post headlines that has nothing to do with the actual article, people will stop comming.
But to think that simply becaus you have a good service, everything else will happen on it's own is a bit naive.
A good example of this exist in the research paper "Frictionsless Commerce". Books.com had lower prices than Amazon.com, so arguably they offered a better service to the customer. Still, Amazon has by far teh biggest marketshare in booksales.
Agree on it's not just about clicking but spending time there. What's important, as you pointed out, not just make someone to click, but, they are satisfied after the click. If the content, after the click, is not satisfied or make visitors felt cheated, it's a bad marketing.
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