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Online headlines shift from concise to click-worthy
https://phys.org/news/2025-05-online-headlines-shift-concise-click.htmltrying to keep this one short...
Over the past 20 years, online news headlines have become longer, more negative, and increasingly focused on click-through rates—regardless of journalistic quality. This is the conclusion reached by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, who analyzed about 40 million headlines from English-language news outlets across the last two decades. Their study has been published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.
The researchers liken the internet to a huge marketplace where journalists use headlines to compete for readers' attention. Attention is a precious commodity in the digital age, as content can be produced more cheaply than ever before—resulting in an oversupply and fierce competition to engage readers' interest.
Headlines play a crucial role in drawing readers in. They need to grab attention and arouse curiosity. Unlike print headlines, the success of each individual online headline can be measured in terms of the number of clicks it receives. The researchers argue that this leads to online headlines being worded to generate as many clicks as possible, effectively becoming clickbait.
"Our analysis shows that the language of online headlines has changed systematically over the years," says lead author Pietro Nickl, a predoctoral fellow in the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. "Many of these changes indicate that they are being adapted to the new affordances and pressures of the digital environment."
. . .
Clickbait headlines are characterized by their length: They are written in a conversational tone and serve to arouse curiosity without revealing much information. In fact, the researchers found that the average length of headlines has increased continuously over time.
They also observed an increased use of linguistic devices typically associated with clickbait. These include active verbs, the use of pronouns such as "I," "you," or "they," and a higher frequency of question words ("how," "what," "why" ). These elements arouse curiosity by creating an information gap that readers can only bridge by clicking to open the article.
. . .
The researchers liken the internet to a huge marketplace where journalists use headlines to compete for readers' attention. Attention is a precious commodity in the digital age, as content can be produced more cheaply than ever before—resulting in an oversupply and fierce competition to engage readers' interest.
Headlines play a crucial role in drawing readers in. They need to grab attention and arouse curiosity. Unlike print headlines, the success of each individual online headline can be measured in terms of the number of clicks it receives. The researchers argue that this leads to online headlines being worded to generate as many clicks as possible, effectively becoming clickbait.
"Our analysis shows that the language of online headlines has changed systematically over the years," says lead author Pietro Nickl, a predoctoral fellow in the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. "Many of these changes indicate that they are being adapted to the new affordances and pressures of the digital environment."
. . .
Clickbait headlines are characterized by their length: They are written in a conversational tone and serve to arouse curiosity without revealing much information. In fact, the researchers found that the average length of headlines has increased continuously over time.
They also observed an increased use of linguistic devices typically associated with clickbait. These include active verbs, the use of pronouns such as "I," "you," or "they," and a higher frequency of question words ("how," "what," "why" ). These elements arouse curiosity by creating an information gap that readers can only bridge by clicking to open the article.
. . .
The data availability and references in the cited nature.com piece (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04514-7) are useful.
8 replies
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I'm shocked! Shocked I tell you!
word "bombshell" in click-bait headlines. 
