Meaning
Online content, especially a headline or thumbnail, deliberately designed to grab attention and lure readers into clicking a link, usually through sensationalism, omission or deception. Strongly pejorative, implying the content behind the link is of dubious value. Informal-to-journalistic register and almost always pejorative; sometimes loosely applied to any disliked headline. Regional use: General English.
Origin
Merriam-Webster dates the first known use of the word to 1999, before the social-web era, and the '-bait' suffix works by analogy with fishing - an appealing lure hiding a hook. No individual coiner is recorded in the standard references. The practice the word describes descends from older attention-grabbing traditions, notably yellow journalism's sensational headlines and bait-and-switch marketing. The term became a staple of media criticism in the early 2010s as sites like Upworthy and the Daily Mail optimised headlines for shares, and by 2014 it triggered an organised backlash: Facebook began algorithmically suppressing clickbait, The Onion launched the parody site ClickHole, and anti-clickbait browser tools and groups emerged. It is now a standard dictionary headword.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- clickbaiting
- clickbaity
- linkbait
Usage Examples
- The headline 'You won't believe what happened next' is textbook clickbait.
- Editors now test headlines for shareability without tipping into clickbait.
- He installed an extension that hides clickbait thumbnails entirely.