Fishing and Clicking

Revenue through clicks, and klicks of revenue. 

I will be the first to own up to being a bit more naive than I had wished I was when I was younger. I was the type of person to scroll through Facebook wondering if scientists had really been hiding a cure-all for aids, rediscovered through the testing conducted on Africanized honey bees. 

I know, it's bad, but bear with me here. 

When I was thinking on the writings of David Auerbach, and what he spoke of in his essay, You Are What You Click, I began to think about click revenue. Back in the day, when I was a young middle schooler, full of hope and convinced that all people were formed with an extra set of breasts that receded in the womb (thanks, click bait), websites capitalized on simply putting the catchiest thing they possibly could in the title, load the pages up with ads and other click bait-y articles to attempt to lure you in further, and then post it to Facebook in the hopes of getting the attention of lots of poor curious saps. 

And it works! It works because deep down, the little kid in us delights at the possibility of knowing something ridiculous. The innate nature of humanity is one of curiosity and exploration. Why would we explore space otherwise? This continues on today, in the forms of 'slideshows'. Each slide puts a tiny amount of information that is stretched across ten slides so that it forces you to visit the page 10 times. It is a clever way to really work that angle for revenue. 

So, if I had to give an advice to my younger self about how she should have operated on the internet, I probably would have told her to turn off cookies, as those are just plain annoying, and I would have told her to visit youtube and watch some SciShow videos, because she would have loved those to death. But most of all, I would tell her to not let the click bait kill her curiosity. I would have told her to keep on exploring, except maybe to do it somewhere other than Facebook.  

(img_src: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHNbitDDW3A)