It's no secret that the way people consume content, both creative and informative, has been changing rapidly over the last several years. Even in the last couple of months, there's been a large push across media sources to draw attention to their stories in different ways. If you've been on social media at all in the last few years, you've undoubtedly heard about the idea of "clickbait" which, in summary, is creating headlines that draw attention even if the actual story isn't well-written or actually has nothing to do with the headline. This is meant to draw more views and therefore create more ad revenue. In short, it's a practice started for money.
Even as someone who doesn't benefit monetarily from how many views my writing gets across my several media presences, even I have begun to feel like I need to satisfy some kind of expectation of viewership. Even here on Odyssey. I'm extremely conscious about every single article I write and how I present it because my views on each piece are tracked and shown to me every time I log in. My article from last week, as you'll see below, was my most viewed piece after weeks and weeks of me starting to tell myself that "There's almost no point in trying since no one is reading these."
There's something about putting a number on my effort that so frequently makes that effort feel totally pointless. Because I, as a writer, try to put as much effort as I can into every single thing I write, and seeing that view count so frequently stay below ten or twenty makes that effort feel wasted or makes me feel like it's not nearly enough. Not only that but the pressure to use clickbait, write listicles, etc. has become somewhat of a major part of internet culture, and as a creator, I think that pressure becomes twofold, making me (and several others I know) feel a certain tug to alter how we write or create in general to draw more attention to our work.
One of my most popular articles up to this point was a seemingly unimportant, lighthearted piece about college whereas my heavier, more relevant and (at least to me) important pieces sometimes hardly even get seen. This kind of trend, unfortunately, starts to make me doubt what I should be writing and if anyone cares about the things that matter to me.
So I think it goes without saying that I think this view-centric culture that so many platforms are pushing for (and has ruined previously credible sites like comicbook.com) is absolutely a harmful way to run things. While I understand that websites have to make money, this push for views makes creators feel as though they can't make real, interesting content in fear that they won't reach the desired view threshold which is something extremely difficult to wrestle with if you're a creative person.
