Click and Go Web Consumption Culture
Seth Godin has a slightly whingy but good post on the demise of thoughtful content. These days most sites and even print magazines are using link-bait style salacious content to try and lure the click-and-go crowd that get their links from sites like Digg or PopURLS (The irony is that I found his article on PopURLS).
I agree with Seth that this this practice is increasing in the web world - but certainly isn't anything new to the print world. WOMAN GIVES BIRTH TO BATBOY is the offline equivalent to Digg link bait.
Although VideoSift is an aggregator - one of the things that I'm thankful for- is that we can be an end destination too - we don't aggregate links to other sites- so people are more likely to spend more time here and share their thoughts.
I agree with Seth that this this practice is increasing in the web world - but certainly isn't anything new to the print world. WOMAN GIVES BIRTH TO BATBOY is the offline equivalent to Digg link bait.
Although VideoSift is an aggregator - one of the things that I'm thankful for- is that we can be an end destination too - we don't aggregate links to other sites- so people are more likely to spend more time here and share their thoughts.
5 Comments
SagemindAs a viewer to the site - I don't need to follow through to the video host site but I can if I feel the need to.
That is what brought me here to start with, I don't even know how I found it in the first place. I liked that all the great videos could be found in one place.
Now that I am more than just a "Viewer" and have become a "Poster" as well, Videosift has sent me off into video sites I never had need of before looking for the gems. So now it does both. It sends me to the other sites and encourages me to watch videos on other popular sites as well as see their ads (great for them) and still brings me back as a landing pad or home base.
I may go to LiveLink, I may go to Youtube, or Break or wherever... but the Sift seems to be my home.
So after reading the term "Girl Births Martian Child" on another video site, I am very likely to "Take the Martian Child to my Leader" here on the sift!
SagemindSeth has some very good points in his article. In the past, the only way advertisers had to measure effectiveness was on page-views and click-throughs. But who was it and were they your audience?
We have become a click-culture, we try to click everything we can so as not to miss out on anything. We click, we go, we see, we leave. We weren't interested but we counted as a click. Chances are we won't go back until we are enticed back by another interesting link and the event repeats. What this doesn't mean is, our click was important - it wasn't but we are counted anyway!
Type in the latest news headline, any one, for example "Michael Jackson Dies". Within an hour, 4000 web sites had the story and by the end of the day, every site (seemingly) had the story. But it was the same story, "TMZ reports..." What an absolute waste of information. Everyone wanting you to read it off their site just so they can get the click, but who profited? Bob's-generic-website didn't - or did they, how many clicks did they get?
It's the people creating the content that deserve the accolades, and not the websites that are hijacking their content and hoping for a few clicks, (that don't really mean anything to begin with). Then the content creators start trying to entice you first, before you go to the hijacker and pretty soon the original content starts to suffer and, in turn, joins the "For Clicks" Race. It becomes a nasty circle. And in the end we all loose.
dagComment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)
I'm just as guilty of this. Almost all of my "go to" sites are aggregators. It goes like this for me:
1. VideoSift (aggregator)
2. Popurls (aggregator)
3. Techmeme (aggregator)
4. TechCrunch (original content)
5. Facebook (aggregator - kind of)
6. huffingtonpost (original content/aggregator)
7. TUAW (original content/aggregator)
gwiz665Aggregators make sense, so it's natural that people use them.
People notice your sift, the look and might even upvote causing others to look and upvote etc. It's a self-perpetuating system when we use hotness, until it eventually peeters out.
Tabloid Titles like the BATBOY example are also prevalent on the sift, I know I certainly do them once in a while, because... dun dun duuun - they work!.
E-Fabs[author flagged as a spammer - redacted]
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