🔴 Surprise inside

Surprise! It’s an essay about clickbait.

“Clickbait” refers here to a specific type of hook: sensational, too good to be true, dramatic, and irresistibly tempting. Lizard-brain appeal.

The 7th paragraph will shock you. Kidding …unless?

— Francis Zierer, Lead Editor

By Francis Zierer

Three years ago this month, I was wandering the night market in Marrakech. Dinnertime. From every stall, a man waving a menu, shouting for my attention.

Walk New York City’s Mulberry Street, Little Italy’s remnant vein, at mealtime, and you’ll hear the same shouts, only advertising pastas instead of grilled meats.

My lens in a situation like this is cynical — I’m a tourist; this is a tourist trap. Don’t fall for it. But it’s fun, and you play the game, and after walking for a while, you give in and pick a vendor.

The food at the stall I chose was fine.

More than the meal, what I remember is another stall’s barker, whose only failure was featuring too early in our market walk. He alone felt honest: “It’s all the same! Just stop here, the next stall won’t be any worse! Ours isn’t any better!”

Short-form video feeds — TikTok, Reels, Shorts — are extreme versions of these streets and markets. You have to assume everything is the same, which is to say, most of the content is not worth any more of your attention than the rest of the content.

The internet did not “democratize” distribution so much as it commoditized distribution. A tsunami is no cure for a drought. What digital distribution platforms have done is increase and reward those among us with an aptitude for weaving market outcomes into creative work.

The tourist in Little Italy or the Marrakech night market, seeking the “experience” over one specific restaurant or vendor, relies on the barker.

For the scroller thumbing Reels, the hook provides that same service — all the more essential in this near-infinite marketplace.

Among the best barkers I’ve interviewed for Creator Spotlight is Grant Beene, our podcast guest earlier this week, who recently crossed 1 billion lifetime views across his TikTok and Reels uploads.

Until you’ve eaten at them all, the restaurants down Mulberry appear all the same, so too the night market stalls in Jemaa el-Fnaa square. I’ll watch any Grant Beene video that graces my feed today, but to earn that trust, he had to lure me in.

Great hooks bring you in, but the product inside is where trust is built or ruined. Tourist traps aren’t reliant on repeat customers; creators are.

When I’m navigating a tourist-trap zone, my guard is up. I’m hearing everything the barkers shout through a cynical filter; I don’t believe them. When I’m at my favorite local bookstore, my guard is down. I trust the place, trust the staff-picks shelf. Low trust, high trust.

We can map any content delivery platform on this earnest-to-cynical spectrum:

In any channel or market, my attitude shifts over time, and individual participants earn and lose my trust.

Instagram (as a whole, not limited to Reels) used to be a high-trust market. By 2016, when the platform introduced the algorithmic feed, the shift was complete. Advertising was first introduced in 2013 and completely opened up in 2015.

Advertising started the transition from high-trust to low-trust market. The endless algorithm-feed, transforming more users into professionalized creators, sealed it.

Any platform with such gamified incentives, where a platform-to-creator payout is tied to the ability to farm attention, becomes a low-trust market … which is still an honest market, as long as the participants understand what’s going on.

The purpose of mapping these channels this way is to understand when to deploy clickbait. It’s not to be used in vetted, trust-based markets. It has to be used in more open, cynical, crowded markets.

Hooks become less effective over time as their usage proliferates (and later, after people stop using them, become effective again).

Grant Beene and many others have seen success with Snapchat-style hooks (phone-quality camera, grey bar at the lower third of the screen as a backdrop for text). But if this style proliferates too far — if the people buying Instagram ads suddenly lean into the style — it’ll become a no-click symbol, a sign to put up your guard.

It’s ultimately not about the market, but about the consumers you’re trying to reach. In Little Italy and the night market, the barkers are clocking and targeting tourists. They know locals know the codes, are immune to the bark, see the bait for what it is.

Clickbait is most effective for attracting new audience — low-risk, high-reward.

With an existing audience, clickbait is high-risk, high-reward. You still want your subscribers to open your newsletter, for example, but if you fail to deliver on the subject line’s promise, you risk losing trust; you risk an unsubscribe.

We enjoy a level of trust with our readers. Last Friday, Natalia wrote a piece about when and whom creators should hire as their businesses grow. We titled it “It's time to make a strategic hire. Which support do you need?" If we were more cynical, we would’ve just titled it “Hiring!”

A title like that? I’d bet the $45 I paid for that night market dinner that issue’s open rate would’ve been multiple points higher. But we’re not hiring.

Nobody hates clickbait; they just hate the mouthfeel of a barbed and empty hook. Great hooks are a service to the customer, who relies on them to rapidly judge whether a piece of content is worth their time.

I watched a nearly minute-long Reel about an engagement shoot last weekend. Both the couple and the photographer were complete strangers to me.

In no world would I have stuck around for just the photoshoot. But the build-up, leveraging a reliably entertaining format (danger, intrigue!), warmed me up, and I did.

Were the photos exceptional?

Just like all babies are cute, all engagement photos are sweet. The bark, the bait, the hook were exceptional, but I couldn’t describe a single photo.

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