Have Clickbait Headlines Ruined The World?

Don’t hate me for it. I already hate myself enough.

My interview with Helen Andrews about her mega-viral article The Great Feminization has gone a bit viral itself on YouTube. As I write this, it has garnered 97,753 views, making it my most-watched video to date. (Just before posting, it was up to 101k views.)

The second most-watched is my 2022 interview with Jonathan Haidt. That’s pretty impressive considering it’s an audio-only episode and the viewing experience consists of watching a squiggling waveform against a purple background.

This recent success might have something to do with the subject matter. The YouTube algorithm loves it some bitches-be-ruining-things content. Men between the ages of 25 and 34 make up the bulk of YouTube’s audience, so it only follows that bro-bait performs better than, say, tutorials about which Eileen Fisher tunic goes best with your Enneagram type.

Until very recently, I put little to no effort into my YouTube channel. I just uploaded the videos and checked back every once in a while to see how they were doing. I didn’t do A/B testing on my titles or allow YouTube’s AI tools to feed me metadata suggestions. I did not do what the real superstars do and study the analytics to see where audiences lost interest, which I suspect would hurt my feelings. I just did whatever I wanted and put it out into the world for whoever happened to like it.

People don’t believe me when I say this, but when I publish a book I never look closely at sales-tracking data or my Amazon ranking—or, God forbid, the customer reviews. I figure there’s no point. I’ve never decided to write or publish something based on its marketability, and I’ve certainly never run analytics on my books to see where readers got bored.

When I say people don’t believe me, I mean they don’t believe me until they themselves look at my sales figures—at which point they believe me.

Lately, I’ve tried to raise my YouTube game. I still refuse to do A/B testing, but I’m being a little shrewder when it comes to the show titles and, above all, the thumbnails. Those are the little images you see describing the show—often in giant type that doesn’t describe it at all. For instance, this classic from A Special Place In Hell. (Our clickbait didn’t count as clickbait because it was ironic.)

In other words, I need to get to the point and get your attention.

This means no more artful titles like The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known (though die-hard fans love that episode). No more The Revolution Will Be Tweeted or Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, though that’s one of my favorite show titles ever.

Nope, I am hereby grabbing a rickety chair from the musty attic of my self-regard and attempting to worm my way to the grown-ups’ table.

And here we have it. Have Women Ruined the World?

Now that’s a title.

Note that I did not say women ruined the world. I merely asked whether they were doing so—which is a totally fair question, even if the answer is obviously no. I’ll admit that my thumbnail dispatched with the question element and stated flatly that “women ruin everything.” But, hey, a girl’s gotta put food on the table (or, in my case, a container of takeout pho on my desk), and oblique references to Emily Dickinson poems about hope and feathers will not tickle the algorithm’s merciless fancy.

In the time it’s taken me to write the preceding paragraphs, the Helen Andrews video was viewed 491 more times and is now up to 98,244 views.

Does this please me? Insofar as 100,000 views might translate into a couple hundred dollars, sure, I guess. But it also makes me a little sick.

I take pride in the non-clickbaitiness of my podcast. Moreover, I know my audience appreciates that—and in some cases supports me precisely because of it. I also know there are people who’ve followed my work for years and don’t approve of some of my political views, but they continue to support me nonetheless.

I have longtime friends who I know deeply disagree with some of the things I say (and undoubtedly revile some of the guests) but still make a habit of pointing out the things they do like. It takes real character to be a person like that. And that’s exactly the person I think of when I release a show title like Have Women Ruined the World?

And to that person, I say: please forgive me. Or, better yet, ignore me.

Has YouTube ruined the world? I say no. There’s a ton of crap there, but there’s also stuff that is superb—like the human stories in Peter Santenello’s travel documentaries or Rick Beato’s virtuosic breakdowns of popular music, to name a few of my favorites. What’s more, these guys have millions of subscribers.

Not as many as MrBeast, whose nearly half a billion subscribers make him the most popular creator on YouTube, but something in the four-to-five-million range—which is roughly 625 times the number of subscribers I have. For the most part, they do it with dignified, or at least non-trollish, headlines—which disproves the conventional wisdom that you can’t succeed on YouTube without OWNING or DESTROYING.

But that’s because they already have lots of subscribers—and, as with compounding interest, subscribers beget subscribers. If I had a million, or even 100,000, I promise I’d go back to the Emily Dickinson headlines. So please, for the sake of decency, hit that subscribe button. You just might save the world.

Housekeeping

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