It’s so terrible: negative headlines are clicked more often, according to the study

Negative headlines increase the consumption of online news. This is demonstrated by researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) in collaboration with international teams on the basis of the material analysis of the Upworthy media platform. Words like “wrong”, “bad” and “terrible” lead to a high number of clicks.

The Upworthy platform under study is “one of the most successful pioneers of clickbait in the history of the Internet,” the researchers write in the study, published Wednesday in the journal “Nature Human Behavior.”

This media platform was particularly suitable for analysis because they have been experimenting with their headlines for years and testing different variants of headlines on their texts. The researchers measured the click-through rate. This indicates how often people who see an article click on it. They examined about 5.7 million clicks on 105,000 articles.

Effect strongest in politics

Overall, click rates ranged from zero to nearly 15 percent. A negative word increased click-through rate by an average of 2.3 percent. On the other hand, positive words such as ‘love’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘beautiful’ animate readers less.

The negative vocabulary had a different effect depending on the topic. He was strongest in news from politics and business, but was also clearly visible in Upworthy’s typical topics of “People”, “Education and Schools” and “LGBT”. The effect was less visible for ‘entertainment’ and ‘women’s rights and feminism’.

“It is noteworthy that while Upworthy describes itself as a positive news portal, we found a bias towards negativity in the data.”, the authors wrote in the study. “Although Upworthy readers chose this portal because of the positive presentation of the news, negative language increased news consumption while positive language decreased it”

(saw/sda)