Seeing is not always believing: an exploratory study of clickbait in WeChat
ISSN: 1066-2243
Article publication date: 13 March 2020
Issue publication date: 18 May 2020
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to unpack the antecedents and consequences of clickbait prevalence in online media at two different levels, namely, (1) Headline-level: what characteristics of clickbait headlines attract user clicks and (2) Publisher-level: what happens to publishers who create clickbait on a prolonged basis.
Design/methodology/approach
To test the proposed conjectures, the authors collected longitudinal data in collaboration with a leading company that operates more than 500 WeChat official accounts in China. This study proposed a text mining framework to extract and quantify clickbait rhetorical features (i.e. hyperbole, insinuation, puzzle, and visual rhetoric). Econometric analysis was employed for empirical validation.
Findings
The findings revealed that (1) hyperbole, insinuation, and visual rhetoric entice users to click the baited headlines, (2) there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the number of clickbait headlines posted by a publisher and its visit traffic, and (3) this non-linear relationship is moderated by the publisher's age.
Research limitations/implications
This research contributes to current literature on clickbait detection and clickbait consequences. Future studies can design more sophisticated methods for extracting rhetorical characteristics and implement in different languages.
Practical implications
The findings could aid online media publishers to design attractive headlines and develop clickbait strategies to avoid user churn, and help managers enact appropriate regulations and policies to control clickbait prevalence.
Originality/value
The authors propose a novel text mining framework to quantify rhetoric embedded in clickbait. This study empirically investigates antecedents and consequences of clickbait prevalence through an exploratory study of WeChat in China.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This paper has been selected as the 27th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2019) fast-track paper (Zhang, W., Jiang, Q. and Peng, C. H., “Unfolding the clickbait: Asiren’s call in the attention economy”, in The 27th European Conference on Information Systems) for possible publication in Internet Research journal. The authors would like to acknowledge the support from National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71801217, 71901208, 71702133, and 71532015), Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation of the Ministry of Education (No. 18YJC630025), Ministry of Education, Science and Technology Development Center (No. 2019J01010), and Shenzhen Special Fund for the Development of Strategic Emerging Industries (No. JCY20170818100156260).
Citation
Zhang, W., Du, W., Bian, Y., Peng, C.-H. and Jiang, Q. (2020), "Seeing is not always believing: an exploratory study of clickbait in WeChat", Internet Research, Vol. 30 No. 3, pp. 1043-1058. https://doi.org/10.1108/INTR-09-2019-0373
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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