Clickbait and Virality: The Origin Story | Tim Wu | Big Think

So there’s a fellow named Jonah Peretti who is somewhat famous as the founder of BuzzFeed, whose role in inventing virality or pushing virality in clickbait has an important role in our present. Jonah was a graduate student in the early 2000s at MIT’s media laboratories, and he had this amusing situation where he ordered a pair of Nike shoes from the custom Nike shoe shop. And then they said, well, what do you want to – you’re able to put whatever you want on it. And he wrote "sweatshop" because he wanted that. And Nike wrote him back and said, well, you can’t use sweatshop. It’s an inappropriate slang. And he said that’s not inappropriate slang by the law; it’s a real word and so forth.

So then they just canceled his order, and he said, can you send me a photo of the Vietnamese girl, ten-year-old, who’s making my shoes? So he did this little exchange, but what’s interesting, it’s kind of amusing, is he put this email on a website and then it became shared and then was shared and then shared. And it was not the first but an early version of what we now call virality; you know, some piece of content goes crazy. And suddenly I talked to him about it and he said, suddenly I was on the media everywhere, and they were asking me about sweatshops. I was like, well, I don’t really know about sweatshops. But this thing happened, and it sort of fascinated him.

He thought, well, here’s a new way of distributing content. It’s not broadcasting where you reach millions of people at once. It’s through sharing and through virality. And all of Peretti’s career from that point forward can kind of be understood as an effort to recapture that lightening in a bottle. So he was one of the cofounders of the Huffington Post in the mid-2000s, and the Huffington Post, you know, it had a website but was also trying to create stuff that could be shared and shared and shared.

And later on, he founded BuzzFeed. The point of BuzzFeed, in some sense, was to master the art and science of virality, to master the shareable click. And I think in some ways, while that’s sort of a fascinating project, not necessarily one of the ones that’s been the greatest for our culture. But anyway, what he did at BuzzFeed was very systematically try and understand what kind of stuff will inspire you, first of all, to click on it and then next to share it with your friends.

And he found out that, for example, cats are very effective. He found out that there are these categories like oh my god, or embarrassing, or hilarious, or gifs, or whatever. So that was BuzzFeed’s entire model was to try to distribute stuff horizontally, so to speak. I think some of these ideas of what we call clickbait are, in other ways, as old as the hills. I mean, I was rereading some of the Penny Press headlines in the 1830s, you know, more than 100 years ago, almost 200 years ago. And they’re stories of suicide, stories of divorces, crazy things with headlines that get you immediately interested.

So it’s older than clickbait. It’s about enticing headlines, and that’s been going on for a long time. Some of these appeals – some of the questions of why these things are appealing is a question that is more about biology than culture, I think. There is a natural reaction we have to certain things – death, sex, violence, enormous monsters. One of the things I did looking at this book, while researching this book, I spent a lot of time looking at successful propaganda posters and the kind of things that activate almost involuntarily our attention. And they’re the same thing. They’re great muscular heroes, terrifying monsters, women in distress, enticing food items.

It gets back to like what we are as creatures as to what attracts us. And why shouldn’t it be that way? I mean, in the wild – I’m not a biologist, but you can imagine the utility if you see something that looks like food; that’s going to get your attention. Or if you see something that looks like danger, well you’ve got to react. And so these modern-day clickbait things are getting at very basic principles of our neurobiology that are there for a reason. Now they didn’t used to be to try to sell us stuff or get us to click on things, but they’re certainly in our biology for a reason.