Are headlines supposed to be confusing, so we have to click on them?
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The term you’re looking for is “clickbait,” and yes, article titles are often deliberately leading, misleading, confusing, or otherwise baiting you into further investigation.
Websites do this so that you have to go to their site and read the article (and more importantly, view the ads) to see what they’re actually saying. If you can get all the relevant points from the headline, you won’t click on it.
yes. these types of catchy headlines isn’t exclusive to online media as well.
sensationalism in media has long been proven to be a great sales tactic for everyone. this has happened with print, and television.
Yes, they will do ANYTHING to get you to click on articles (from my knowledge, they get paid the more people visit their articles? Correct me if im wrong). But they will put confusing terms and phrases, words used to grab attention, misleading statements. I’ve even seen a story talking about something really bad happening in the title but it was split into like 15+ articles (I dont even think im exaggerating) that led to the conclusion being, the title never happened.
Historically, newspapers used headlines to succinctly summarize what followed so readers could quickly locate stories of interest within the impenetrable mass of text that newspapers used to contain.
Today, digital media producers use headlines to increase traffic to their websites, because traffic is the main metric used to derive advertising revenue potental.
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