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Steve Hind: When readers are lured in and rewarded for their curiosity with good content, everyone wins. Sites like Buzzfeed use this to their advantage, and traditional media should take note..
.Last week the internet was treated to another great offering from Randall Munroe, author of the xkcd cartoon blog.
In it, Munroe re-imagined 20th century headlines if they were written to get more clicks. "This one weird mould kills all germs" could have applied to the discovery of penicillin in 1928. "You won't believe what these people did to the Berlin Wall" could have appeared in November 1989 for maximum effect.
His point, of course, was that the "clickbait-ification" of our news is cheapening it....
The fact is clickbait content marketing and news work. Here's the irony. In The Guardian news story about clickbait, is it clickbait in itself or is it a legitimate story first?