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Something happened about three weeks ago that illustrates that clickbait headlines have a detrimental effect on what kind of audience you have. I will tell you what happened and why it's such a problem.
But before we get to that, we need to talk about trust vs traffic.
One of the dilemmas that every newspaper faces is that it is well known that the publishers who usually get the most traffic are also the publishers who are the least trusted.
We have seen this in countless studies, and the exception to this seems to be national broadcasters.
Let me give you a simple example of this. Let's look at the UK as an example.
Here is a graph listing how much people trust each of the major news brands in the UK. At the top is the BBC, followed by many others like the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, etc. ... and at the very bottom, are the tabloids like Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, and The Sun.
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Baekdal is a magazine for media professionals, focusing on media analysis, trends, patterns, strategy, journalistic focus, and newsroom optimization. Since 2010, it has helped publishers in more than 40 countries, including big and small publishers like Condé Nast, Bonnier, Schibsted, NRC, and others, as well as companies like Google and Microsoft.
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