Click bait, now usually written as one word, is web content designed mainly to tempt people into clicking on it. The bait is almost always a headline or thumbnail that overpromises, or that withholds the one fact you actually want, so that curiosity does the rest. The term is always derogatory: to call something click bait is to say the headline made a promise the page behind it never intended to keep.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘click bait’?
The metaphor comes from fishing. Bait is whatever goes on the hook to make something bite, and English has used the word figuratively for a lure or enticement since around 1400. The language already keeps a whole tackle box of angling idioms, from fish or cut bait to being let off the hook, so once web publishers needed a word for a lure aimed at the mouse click, click bait was close to inevitable.
The word is older than most people assume. Reference researchers trace it to at least 1999, in the American trade journal Network Magazine, a full decade before the practice it names became notorious. Through the 2000s it remained niche jargon among web publishers and online marketers, the people whose living depended on the difference between a headline that got clicked and one that didn’t.
What pushed it into everyday speech was the viral-content boom of the early 2010s. Sites such as Upworthy, which was drawing criticism for the style by 2012, and BuzzFeed built huge audiences on headlines engineered around what became known as the curiosity gap: give readers just enough to make them curious, but not enough to satisfy that curiosity without clicking through. ‘You won’t believe what happened next’ became the signature construction of the era, and click bait became the standard sneer for it. The backlash peaked in 2014. The Onion launched ClickHole, an entire website parodying Upworthy-style headlines. BuzzFeed felt obliged to publish a piece titled ‘Why BuzzFeed Doesn’t Do Clickbait’, its editor Ben Smith defining the term narrowly as a headline that is dishonest about the article beneath it. And in August of that year Facebook announced technical measures to demote click bait in its news feed, using the time readers spent on a linked page to tell an honest headline from a baited one.
The dictionaries followed the traffic, with the word gaining entries in the leading references between 2014 and 2016. Its meaning has loosened along the way. What began as a term of art for one particular headline trick is now a general insult for any content judged shallow, misleading or made purely to grab attention, online or off.