YouTube is suffering from a clickbait epidemic — and has been for years. A recent video, however, caught the attention of almost every major creator and the community-at-large, reigniting conversation about the growing problem.
The video was by content creator Carmie Sellitto, who goes by touchdalight on YouTube. Entitled “One Kill = One Clothing With My 13-Year-Old Sister,” the video shows Sellitto’s friend and fellow YouTuber, Millie T, removing an article of clothing if he gets a kill in the game. She’s in no way related to him, and she’s certainly not 13.
Sellitto has since removed the video.
It’s a lewd concept, but Sellitto isn’t the first YouTuber to play along with “strip Fortnite.” Much bigger YouTubers like RiceGum, who boasts more than 10 million subscribers, have been called out for producing similar videos. Sellitto isn’t a special case, he’s just another YouTuber who got caught for producing a never-ending series of clickbait titles and thumbnails.
Sellitto’s entire career is based on clickbait. He uses the 13-year-old sister trope often, makes references to starting fights with people that never really happen, and spent a portion of a video called “Reading My Brother’s Suicide Note” by asking people to “smash that thumbs up button 5,000 times.” Sellitto’s thumbnails and titles, which use clickbait tactics, represent a bigger problem than just one YouTuber looking to find success on the platform.
In a followup video to the controversy, Sellitto admitted he was using clickbait tactics as a way to become popular.
“I’m literally just a boy talking to my camera trying to make a few clickbait videos, trying to get my name out there,” Sellitto said. “My name’s kind of out there now, but probably not for a good reason ... My humor is so messed up to the point where I didn’t know where to stop, like I literally don’t have any limits to clickbait, clearly.”
The issue, as other YouTubers like Philip DeFranco pointed out, is that Sellitto is just a cog in the clickbait machine that drives YouTube. People in Sellitto’s community were leaving comments suggesting that if Logan Paul, the notorious YouTuber who came under fire for uploading a video that featured the body of a man who committed suicide, could survive on YouTube, so could Sellitto.
DeFranco said that if this is the bar people need to clear on YouTube for what is acceptable to get an audience’s attention, then maybe it’s time to address what YouTube has become.
“If the bar for what is wrong or right is showcasing and exploiting a dead body in your video, that’s kind of troubling to me,” DeFranco said. “As we’ve kind of seen over the past few years, you can be stupid, and disgusting and still thrive.”
It’s something that Casey Neistat has talked about in the past — and one of the reasons he alluded to in a previous video for wanting to quit daily vlogging in the first place.
“Clickbait titles, catchy thumbnails, and shareable content are necessary if this is something you want to do as a job,” Neistat said in 2016. “But not everyone wants that.”
YouTube’s algorithm is easy to game. It’s a system that rewards creators for figuring out what works, and then doing that same thing over and over again. On YouTube, it’s clickbait to the highest degree. As pop culture expert Joe Veix pointed out just this week, “Getting attention on social media platforms requires creating content designed to perform well within their ecosystems. Everything must contort to please the almighty Algorithmic Gods.”
It’s not like YouTube’s executives aren’t aware of the issues. Robert Kyncl, YouTube’s head of business and the man who oversees creators, spoke about trying to change the incentives for creators. The company wants creators to move away from salacious videos, tags and clickbait advertising, but Kyncl said they understand why creators are drawn to such marketing tactics.
“We’re thinking very deeply — and every single day — on how do we create the right incentives and disincentives for creators to do the right thing on YouTube,” Kyncl said. “That means a lot of different things. That means do the right thing for advertisers, do the right thing for their users, for the platform organically, and not chase sensationalism; not chase views for the sake of views, and not chase drama for the sake of views — and not use drama at our expense for the sake of views.”
Views are everything. The more views a YouTuber amasses, the more advertising revenue they earn and the more likely their subscriber base will grow. RiceGum spoke about clickbait issues on YouTube, and his ongoing “strip Fortnite” series just this week after he was called out by TSM_Myth, one of the biggest Fortnite players in the world and a popular Twitch streamer.
RiceGum was blunt in his assessment that if something works on YouTube and gets views, why shouldn’t he, or anyone else, repeat that format again and again?
“If the video didn’t do good, I would have just stopped it there, “ RiceGum said. “Just one strip Fortnite. But the video did so good that I had to do a part two. I had to do a part three. I had to do a part four. So that’s what I did, man.
“If I knew a certain type of video gets a stupid amount of views ... why would I not abuse it and keep pushing it out?”
Most of these videos are monetized, another facet of the clickbait epidemic that the community is upset about, but that only encourages people to do it again. PewDiePie, YouTube’s biggest creator, spoke about this in 2016. He summed up the phenomenon best, admitting the only way to keep a career going on YouTube was playing the game everyone else was.
“Clickbaiting, almost everyone does it,” he said. “If you don’t do it, you’re not going to get views. I can spend days on a video and it will get less views than a video that we shit out for 10 minutes that has a better title. YouTube is really unfair in that regard, and what it leads to is good content sometimes getting buried by ‘clickable’ content.”
Comments
"If you don’t do it, you’re not going to get views."
Disagree. There are plenty of channels I follow that never, ever come close to clickbait that rake in hundreds of thousands of views per upload and millions of views a week.
By Daniel Ware King on 04.13.18 7:01pm
There are exceptions to most rules, especially in the social realm.
By Lil Kut-Ku on 04.13.18 9:33pm
Disagree to your disagree. There’s probably X channels (10? 100? 1000?) for every one of those not-clickbait channels that aren’t "raking in" by the hundreds of thousands. The very top youtubers agrees on it, so I’ll trust the "professionals" on this one.
By CameForTheClickbaitStayedForTheComments on 04.14.18 6:19am
You can apply that exact same logic to the clickbait channels. You can make a ton of clickbait videos and still not rake in views by the hundreds of thousands. If it were a foolproof plan, I’d quit my job today and make them because that’s a hell of a lot easier than doing actual work for a living.
That being said, there are people that make quality, high-effort videos – some of them are successful and some of them aren’t.
Then there are people that make shitty, low-effort clickbait videos because they’re assholes – some of them are successful and some of them aren’t.
By Katholikos on 04.16.18 9:36pm
Don’t be so literal. It isn’t that they won’t get ANY views, or viewers, it is that they get SUBSTANTIALLY MORE viewers if they use clickbait tactics. And even those that don’t engage in clickbait to the extreme that is being discussed above, even non-clickbait channels ape strategies in titles that are designed to bring more people in. It’s basic advertising.
By narrativelies on 04.15.18 12:41am
Umm, while The Algorithm certainly has a hand in this, clickbait is largely a braindead humans problem.
By axemtitanium on 04.13.18 7:12pm
I think the idea would be to actually craft an algorithm to counteract that.
For instance, if people rely on clickbait to get views, stop or at least strongly discourage advertising their videos in suggestions and such.
Of course, that’s just about as nontrivial a problem to leave for an automated system to decide as it gets. I’m not exactly confident any automated system could get it right.
In fact, I’d be barely confident in a team of human moderators to do this particularly successfully…
By Kram1032 on 04.14.18 2:23pm
So YouTubers are clickbaiting with paedophilia nowadays? I miss when YouTubers were just making videos for fun.
By Nathan_DTS on 04.13.18 8:16pm
Youtubers are still making videos for fun. Polygon just talks about the lame ones all the time; there’s plenty of other people that make good content.
By NYCman100 on 04.14.18 3:50pm
DeFRANCO and Neistat both mentioned, in their videos, that using clickbait titles is ok. But how extreme can you go?
By Oceanic815 on 04.13.18 8:41pm
That was weird for a second; after reading the paragraph mentioning the title and then the detail about it not being his sister and so on. I got confused and wondered if people were mad that there wasn’t a nude 13 year old. But I guess the anger is really at how unsavory clickbait has gotten?
By ChronoSapien on 04.13.18 10:02pm
Congrats, PDP, Logan Paul & cia. Thats your legacy.
By I_Dont_Know_English on 04.13.18 11:10pm
Is God of War out yet
By Menage on 04.14.18 4:47am
Is the problem really the creator or the consumer? Would clickbait be an issue if there weren’t millions of clickers willing to click?
Like PBR (which I love, unfortunately), $10 1.75L Vodka, and Toyota Camrys, clickbait exists because there’s a market for it.
Maybe if everyone was publicly forced to reveal their YouTube history things would be different. Nothing like public humiliation to conform behavior.
By craznoe on 04.14.18 5:25am
Yeah, i’d think that if something advertised as "strip poker with a 13 year old" is considered click bait then you have to start considering that a lot of the people who use your service are creepy perverts and that might be something that deserves some attention.
By vyvexthorne on 04.14.18 1:01pm
It’s a problem on both ends. People shouldn’t be clicking a video teasing child nudity – that’s fucking disgusting.
At the same time, assholes shouldn’t make a video teasing child nudity – that’s also fucking disgusting.
By Katholikos on 04.16.18 9:39pm
No point wondering why so many people who would otherwise make good content are dissuaded from starting. Who would spend hours editing a good video and sensibly uploading 2-3 times a week (if you work alone it’s tough to imagine doing more), if what really matters it farting out crap content on a daily basis? Knowing you could spend 1-2 years trying to develop a channel and still be suffocated by the tons of bad content doing million views, while you do a paltry 20-30K at best in an oversaturted environment is terrible.
Of course a ton of people, the shameless ones, will just try doing whatever to gain clicks while the rest suffer. Right now it’s mostly established good channels that have been tere for years > clickbait crap > a ton of new creators trying to make it, burning out and quitting because of algorithms screwing them over.
By Nastee on 04.14.18 5:57am
I wonder if anyone has any good, tangible ideas on how to solve this?
By CameForTheClickbaitStayedForTheComments on 04.14.18 6:07am
I’ll go with one: create functionality for "viewer factions". Just like factions or orgs in large MMOs, you’d find a group that shares your opinion on what good content really is. It’d work just like youtube works today: you rate content thumbs up or thumbs down – so when you watch videos, you’ll get a small "match percentage" visible next to the thumbnail (kind of like on netflix?) Also you should be able to filter by this value. If people from your viewer faction rates is up, the odds are higher for it to show up. To keep it simple, you could even generate these factions automatically, putting you in groups by analyzing your interests and matching you with similar people (e.g. pinterest does this)
By CameForTheClickbaitStayedForTheComments on 04.14.18 6:13am
A button that says "click bait" and after a certain amount of people have pressed it, the video will have a small label warning those who havn’t watched it, that it is click bait. Also kind of like the thumbs up/down button.
By Wacky_Wombat61 on 04.14.18 7:53am
Don’t the clickbait titles already tell you its clickbait?
By NYCman100 on 04.14.18 9:33pm
It really depends. Some people are really good at making click bait videos look legit. If a video as a decent thumbnail, or a interesting title. How are we supposed to know it’s click bait unless we watch it? This way at least people who have been clever about it, and have gotten some people to watch it, will now have a warning stating that the Youtuber doesn’t quite show what he says he does.
By Wacky_Wombat61 on 04.15.18 12:57am
True, but then again; sometimes the clickbait articles are actually "true" – what is said in the title and thumbnail, might actually happen just like that in the video.
By CameForTheClickbaitStayedForTheComments on 04.15.18 10:29am
Maybe once a video gets a certain amount of "flags" of click bait YouTube can go in and check if it is legit or actually click bait. Then label it accordingly.
By Wacky_Wombat61 on 04.16.18 1:41am
I actually really like the simplicity of this idea, but I’m afraid that it will be abused resulting in youtube warfare. (which is why I suggested factions – if you could only see what your faction had to say, then fighting couldn’t occur because other people’s opinions are unavailable anyway)
By CameForTheClickbaitStayedForTheComments on 04.15.18 10:28am