Unfolding the Clickbait: A Siren’s Call in the Attention Economy

Wenping Zhang, Qiqi Jiang, Chih-Hung Peng

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Abstract

The media consumption moving online was supposed to enable people to access information more effectively, instead, to some extent, people were yet overwhelmed. Clickbait, defined as “(On the Internet) content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page” (in Oxford English Dictionary), prevails and restrains people re-trieve their desirable information effectively. In this exploratory study, we proposed two intriguing research conjectures, i.e. how rhetorical features in the clickbait influence the visiting traffic to the publisher at different levels, and attempted to understand the antecedents and consequences of the prevalence of clickbait. In collaboration with a leading digital media company, we longitudinally collected a massive dataset in 2017. To test the research conjectures, we designed and developed a series of text mining methods and applied econometric analysis for empirical validation. The findings revealed 1) the rhetorical characteristics (hyperbole, insinuation, and visual rhetoric) could entice individual to click the baited headlines, 2) there was a quadratic (inverted U-shaped) relationship between number of clickbait posted by publisher and its visit traffic, and 3) such non-linear relationship was moderated by publisher’s age.
OriginalsprogEngelsk
TitelECIS 2019 Proceedings
Antal sider15
UdgivelsesstedAtlanta, GA
ForlagAssociation for Information Systems. AIS Electronic Library (AISeL)
Publikationsdato2019
ISBN (Trykt)9781733632508
StatusUdgivet - 2019
BegivenhedThe 27th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) 2019: Information Systems for a Sharing Society - Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sverige
Varighed: 8 jun. 201914 jun. 2019
Konferencens nummer: 27
http://ecis2019.eu/

Konference

KonferenceThe 27th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) 2019
Nummer27
LokationStockholm University
Land/OmrådeSverige
ByStockholm
Periode08/06/201914/06/2019
Internetadresse
NavnProceedings of the European Conference on Information Systems
ISSN0000-0034

Emneord

  • Clickbait
  • Text mining
  • Rhetoric

Citationsformater