All of you have seen those article titles that are meant to capture your attention. Every publication company has started to implement this advertising method because they believe it captures the largest audience viewing.
Clickbait is defined as content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page. Flashy headlines and cover photos, misleading titles, and extremely controversial topics are used to catch the viewers' attention.
But what happens when the writers who create these articles are not catering to this obnoxious trend?
Like many of the writers for Odyssey, I have been creating content pieces for at least a year, since May 2016, for myself. There has been a change in how our content is being posted, though. Many of the articles we are posting are no longer our own.
For the past handful of months, many of the articles I have written were modified without my knowledge and then posted. The modifications include content (though this has not occurred since the Fall of 2016), headlines, and cover photos.
When you write an article for a publication company, you are open to being given suggestions. If you agree with the suggestions, you make the changes. If you do not, you either tell them it will be posted without them or that they cannot post it at all. At Odyssey, your article can be posted without any notification of changes.
So why might this be an issue? Your work is no longer your work.
That title that you carefully thought out gets changed to something that is really tacky. Not to offend anyone using clickbait titles, but using a headline such as, "Why Women Should Not Be Allowed To Work" and then writing the complete opposite is redundant. It is misleading to the viewers, very aggravating, and people will comment or share without even reading the article. The clickbait catchy-ness trend has led to so much stupidity online.
Correct my grammar, change a spelling error, suggest a different photo or request a different headline. I do not mind that, and I am sure other writers do not as well.
But changing my headline or cover photo so that I can get your portion of the community more views based on a title that does not even relate--that makes me no longer wish to be a creator for your company. You take away our voice by modifying our creations. Some of the title changes you have made, especially on my articles, have been really misleading and crafted without thought of the article's true content.
I wanted to write so that I could give people information if they were searching for it. My articles that got significant viewer stats were written from the heart without modification. They did not have some misleading clickbait title. What happened to the way our site used to run?
