I bet you must have seen posts like “When She Looked At The Street, She Saw That!” “The Dog Barked At A man, His Reaction Is Priceless!” “X Problems Only Y People Understand!”, etc. While some of you are not interested in this type of articles and scroll past the posts, undoubtedly, most of people will click these posts. Posts like these are called clickbaits. Here is the definition of clickbait from Oxford Dictionary:

Most people who click the clickbait posts feel that the posts are not worth of the click. Not like informative posts, clickbait posts don’t aim to educate people or deliver information. They lure the clicks from talking about common sense and making connections with readers.

However, clickbait may become a thing of the past. Just yesterday, Facebook announced the new anti-clickbait algorithm. The algorithm aims to filter out clickbait news feeds for the users. Rather than binarily deciding whether the post is a clickbait or not, the new algorithm will give every post a clickbait score, which represents how egregious the post is. Facebook already started manually classifying thousands of posts with a clickbait score in order to train its algorithm. The post with a worse clickbait score, the more Facebook will punish either the single post or the entire page. According to Facebook’s VP of Product Management, Adam Mosseri, if the user posts multiple times a day, and only one piece is a clickbait, he won’t be punished by the new algorithm. However, if a user posts clickbait posts all day, he will be punished.

As we all know, Buzzfeed is one of the major clickbait users. Buzzfeed frequently makes posts like “X Problems Only Y Will Understand!” Although I have to admit that there will be people who think the post is worth of the click, most people, including me, regret checking out the posts after clicking them, because they don’t think they are getting anything, neither news nor knowledge. According to a statistic conducted by Keyhole, a real-time social media analytic agency, about 63% of the Buzzfeed’s posts are considered as clickbaits.

While some people think Buzzfeed is an outrageous clickbait strategy user, they don’t think so. Buzzfeed seems to have a different definition of clickbait. Ben Smith, Buzzfeed’s Editor-in-Chief, explains that clickbait means tricking people into clicking, whereas Buzzfeed’s goal is to create a share-worthy content. (People apparently don’t buy it, because honestly, how many times you will actually share articles about “X Problems Only Y Understand” article.) However, we can’t blame Buzzfeed for such an activity because its business model was built on the popularity of the posts.

So the question comes down to: does the new anti-clickbait algorithm mean Facebook is starting a warfare against Buzzfeed? The new gatekeeper will definitely make an impact on Buzzfeed’s current content generating method, though we don’t know what type of content they are going to shift it to. One possibility is that Buzzfeed can study the new algorithm and find a way to optimize their headline to get around the gatekeeper. Buzzfeed also notices the importance of the newsworthiness in the articles. They shift their focus to more current topic related than simple clickbait. Additionally, Buzzfeed still has another bridgehead, YouTube. Buzzfeed produces many clickbait-like videos every month, such as “People Try X Food”. Unless Google and YouTube wants to make actions against clickbait, Buzzfeed will still flourish on YouTube.

In the end, Facebook’s anti-clickbait algorithm will definitely help reduce the individual clickbait posters, but I am personally skeptical about its impact on major clickbait posters, like Buzzfeed. No matter how people criticize Buzzfeed’s clickbait strategy, we can’t deny the fact that it is extremely successful. It helps Buzzfeed become one of the fast growing businesses in recent years.