We live in the clickbait era of the internet and this is mostly because everyone who is a "content consumer" on the internet is spoilt for content choices, so much that creators or content makers now have to rely on baits to get people to click on their videos.
.In the past one year, I've been trying to learn how to do stuffs on YouTube. Most times I see videos with the exact same titles of the things I'm searching for only to watch 80% of the video and discover that the owner of the video was actually lying.
Sometimes back, i was trying to decipher how to use Capcut, some tricks and all that, I saw a video from a lady, watch the video till the end only to discover the content was rubbish and didn't provide a solution.
So I should have probably gone to the comment section, but I was already hit with an "EUREKA" moment when I found the video and didn't stop to think it was false. It's also the same for people making videos like "how to make people watch your videos on YouTube".
This is a search time that hundreds of thousands of people input everyday on YouTube, but 80% of the videos or even more providing answers to that query are mostly rubbish content used to bait people into watching.
This year alone I've watched hundreds of videos on YouTube and the idea has always been to better myself, my craft and learn, but I've had to watch useless contents with bait titles to truly understand what it means to watch, see or value what good content looks like.
There are good contents, and there are bad contents, but most times, the people who sell the most are the ones with bait titles.
Take a look at the title of this post for example. I've seen a lot of titles with videos on it, and most times 99% of them are just trash content, thriving or feeding on people's curiosity, ignorance and eagerness.
In my early days of watching videos I'd see things like "how to achieve YouTube watch hours easily" and other baity contents like that. You see these creators understands that people are looking for tricks to solve different problems.
Now, while these tricks actually exists, only few people actually has these informations and most times they'll never talk about them or post it in video because they already understand that it takes a lot of effort, time and sacrifices to acquire that hack that they already have.
But most people who would use bait titles to share videos are mostly not sharing information regarding anything, just videos where they beat around the bush without actually saying anything meaningful.
Keep watching out for the good ones.
However, we cannot but admit that we live in an internet era where we need to be extra unique, attractive and special to grab attention, and most times the competition remains unfair and swallows us up.
As a creator who has been creating for over 14 years. I know when a video is "bait" or has a bait intent, and from afar, I can already predict it. Most times in life, the hardest things are the most secret things, and when people offer it for free without gatekeeping, it's probably fake and not real.
The psychology of a human makes him predisposed to gatekeep life-changing informations and not share it for free or for clicks, and most times it would take an incredible human being to share what they would normally gatekeep for free, and as I've said yesterday, life's not filled with a lot of good people.
Back to bait contents.
I think everyone at some point has seen them. The titles promises to deliver insane results and that's how people get to watch and because creators will continue doing creative things for click, it'll only get more diabolical.
The danger is that content like that takes our attention away from the ones that truly matter, but we must continue searching, till we find useful ones that delivers value.
