It seems more and more YouTubers are moving towards clickbait titles, especially since very Tassamese video about how clickbait works really well. And by clickbait I don't necessarily mean dishonest, but just trying to be intriguing in the thumbnail and the title to get people to click on the video even though they weren't intending to watch that in the first place. And I know a lot of you are going to say, but clickbait doesn't work on me. Well that's okay. There's just a lot more people where clickbait does work and so everybody's moving towards clickbait. So why is it taking most YouTubers this long to get out to the whole clickbait thing? Well I think it's because clickbait didn't used to be the best strategy. I used to always title my videos and my articles to try to best match people's query for what they were searching for because before social media and everybody scrolling through their social media feeds on their phones, it was all about answering people's questions. The way you got traffic was through search and if you could best answer somebody's question, you'd get the click. And so I'd even go through Google Trends and use Google AutoComplete to try to figure out for a topic that I was writing about how people searched for it so that I could structure my title to best match people's queries. And in fact back in 2006 the New York Times ran an article, I think it was titled, This Boring Headline written for Google because back then everybody was doing it including the newspapers. You'd write your headline so that the search engine could best evaluate what it was about so you'd get that search result. The problem is that search strategy has stopped working in recent years like as in the last 10 years perhaps. It gradually stopped working because Google for the most part answers the search queries themselves by showing you snippets of stuff they found that mostly answers the question, which for the user is great of course you save time but as somebody who tries to answer that question with a web page or video, well you're just not going to get that click but with search not working so well anymore for getting traffic, it's all about sucking people in as they're scrolling through their news feeds on social media. So you need a title and a thumbnail that really sucks people in even though they weren't actually looking for what you've got. You no longer trying to answer an important question you're just trying to entertain them, use up their time to get a little bit of ad revenue. And I have to say I think it's successful to a large extent because videos with click badey titles work better. I've been moving a bit towards that and some of my videos that do have titles that are more click badey really works. In fact even going back to 2008 when I built my Django Pistol I knew that's not something that anybody would ever search for because why would you think of that. So the title was just simply Django Pistol and I knew it was intriguing and it got a lot of traffic back then. It was one of my first viral videos. Now getting sucked into some of these videos they're entertaining to watch so it is a good source of entertainment. But the problem is us creators we're trying to entertain people who aren't necessarily looking for entertainment and we are getting so good at sucking people in that we're taking time away from other things. Granted if we're taking time away from sitcoms and CNN that's a good thing but we're taking time away from people doing useful things, interacting with friends, getting outside, getting worked on. So I feel like us creators creating these intriguing and click badey is kind of titles. That really suck people in. It's like we are makers of cigarettes nowadays. Sure a smokers experience is enhanced the time that they're smoking a cigarette but that smokers life overall would be much better off if they never ever smoked a cigarette. And so similarly with all of these entertaining videos that we create we take away so much time from useful things that I no longer feel that we're doing a good thing. But what am I to do? Sure I can make videos and answer questions that nobody watches which is not very satisfying either. And so I too try to make my thumbnails and titles to be more intriguing but I don't feel good about it. I just wish things hadn't gone that way. But with so many people making content online these days the competition has just gotten very fierce for getting eyeballs. Anyways I'm posting this video on my my T.S. Talks YouTube channel. I haven't posted on that one in a long time. I've just about abandoned that channel but it's nice to post on it again once in a while and you know like maybe once a year. Who knows I might post on there some more if people watch enough of it. If I can suck you in that's it. Okay that's it. Bye bye.