A case against clickbait titles that linus uses

[Ravendarat]

The click bait controversy honestly has always kinda puzzled me. I don't think there is a single time Ive clicked on an LTT video and now know at least roughly what the video was gonna be about. Like ya I get the titles aren't exactly all encompassing and there can be an argument made there but overall Ive never seen a video where I clicked and thought "this isn't at all what I thought it was gonna be"

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

1 hour ago, Ravendarat said:

Like ya I get the titles aren't exactly all encompassing and there can be an argument made there but overall Ive never seen a video where I clicked and thought "this isn't at all what I thought it was gonna be"

What is this about?

 

 

Because aside from having something to do with Intel, I have no ducking clue. I assume it's about ECC or something. And because I don't know, I don't care.

 

Now, allow me to bother, just this once, to click on it.

 

Wow, turns out it's about overclocking. Something I very much care about. Wish I had known that going in...

 

 

[crazzp]

10 minutes ago, Hairless Monkey Boy said:

Wow, turns out it's about overclocking. Something I very much care about. Wish I had known that going in...

Because the reverse may also be true.

 

There may be two groups of people who may not click on the video if the title is obvious and states overclocking.

1. People who are not interested to overclock.

2. People who are masters and know everything about overclock.

 

LTT's strategy is to lure those who are curious to find out what LTT meant and then make them stay through their goofiness and dropping skills.

 

It's like baiting someone to eat a dish they've not tried before and hoping they like it.

 

Also, their nearest competitor should be Gamers Nexus, not MKBHD. LTT don't talk about phones much nowadays. Even those 2 have big differences.

[divito]

Is the OP insinuating that the algorithm can differentiate a clickbait title?

Making a "clickbait" title and establishing or analyzing viewer trends has little to do with the algorithm and more to do with social trends and human psychology. A cliffhanger title/image or clickbait title/image is simply more likely to convert a fence-viewer enough to be still utilized by many top Youtubers.

[Middcore]

1 hour ago, divito said:

Is the OP insinuating that the algorithm can differentiate a clickbait title?

Making a "clickbait" title and establishing or analyzing viewer trends has little to do with the algorithm and more to do with social trends and human psychology. A cliffhanger title/image or clickbait title/image is simply more likely to convert a fence-viewer enough to be still utilized by many top Youtubers.

 

Good point. I don't think anybody has claimed that clickbait titles grease the gears of the YouTube algorithm(s); if OP thinks that's what Linus has said, I think he's misunderstood (although OP will probably just ignore this point as Linus fanboyism since that seems to be how he pre-emptively dismisses all rebuttals). 

 

I can see how a creator would make the argument that since the algorithm is more or less unknowable, cheap but relatively reliable human psychology "exploits" like clickbait titles become a necessity as a hedge against one day suddenly finding yourself disfavored by the arbitrary black box. Perhaps that's gotten muddled in some people's minds into "the algorithm itself likes clickbait titles."

[divito]

24 minutes ago, Middcore said:

Good point. I don't think anybody has claimed that clickbait titles grease the gears of the YouTube algorithm(s); if OP thinks that's what Linus has said, I think he's misunderstood (although OP will probably just ignore this point as Linus fanboyism since that seems to be how he pre-emptively dismisses all rebuttals). 

 

I can see how a creator would make the argument that since the algorithm is more or less unknowable, cheap but relatively reliable human psychology "exploits" like clickbait titles become a necessity as a hedge against one day suddenly finding yourself disfavored by the arbitrary black box. Perhaps that's gotten muddled in some people's minds into "the algorithm itself likes clickbait titles."

Creators have likely done a ton of testing, and analyzing the statistics of their videos when they do x1, x2, y1, y2, etc... Sure, there is some aspect of "being at the mercy of the algorithm," and there will be things that can be inferred about the algorithm when certain tests can't necessarily be explained.

But as I, and you allude to, of the "muddled" portion of inference; basic video creation, and basic psychological tactics likely cause enough of a shift in UI behavior that it meaningfully triggers aspects of the algorithm that further influence recommendations, etc..

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

3 hours ago, crazzp said:

LTT's strategy is to lure those who are curious to find out what LTT meant

Yup. They acquire the ADD addled masses, but lose people like me, the long time fans with a nominal attention span.

 

Honestly, it's probably a good trade considering I use AdBlock, and the ADD addled masses couldn't be bothered to.

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

3 hours ago, Hairless Monkey Boy said:

What is this about?

 

 

Because aside from having something to do with Intel, I have no ducking clue. I assume it's about ECC or something. And because I don't know, I don't care.

 

Now, allow me to bother, just this once, to click on it.

 

Wow, turns out it's about overclocking. Something I very much care about. Wish I had known that going in...

 

 

From the thumbnail I thought it was about the whole LGA1700 contact frame thing. Nope, it wasn't. 

 

13 minutes ago, Hairless Monkey Boy said:

Yup. They acquire the ADD addled masses, but lose people like me, the long time fans with a nominal attention span.

 

Honestly, it's probably a good trade considering I use AdBlock, and the ADD addled masses couldn't be bothered to.

And is why I've since unsubscribed. 

[Blue4130]

The problem with comparing veritasium to ltt is the target demographic. They are completely different. Veritasium is targeted towards older, more educated viewers while LTT is largely young teens who are less aducated. Guess who clicbait works well on?

[crazzp]

1 hour ago, Hairless Monkey Boy said:

They acquire the ADD addled masses, but lose people like me, the long time fans with a nominal attention span.

Lol insulting people who are different from you. Please step down from the high horse.

 

51 minutes ago, Blue4130 said:

They are completely different. Veritasium is targeted towards older, more educated viewers while LTT is largely young teens who are less aducated. 

How do you know this? Any data to back up your claim? LTT showed that majority of their viewers are late 20s-early30s. And that was 4-5 years ago. But also note that there are no official stats on teenagers

[xg32]

14 hours ago, Watanabe said:

.

You are comparing two different types of channels, different audiences. I'm watching a tech channel, this is the first time ive heard of Veritasium and the videos are not for me.

 

LTT seems to be doing just fine in views.  Most of this is pure speculation and LTT are the ones with stake in this. If they don't think it's good for them, they'd simply stop doing it.

 

I personally click on about half the videos on the main channel.

 

MrBeast is probably the closest one to having the algo "figured out"

[Blue4130]

1 hour ago, crazzp said:

Lol insulting people who are different from you. Please step down from the high horse.

 

How do you know this? Any data to back up your claim? LTT showed that majority of their viewers are late 20s-early30s. And that was 4-5 years ago. But also note that there are no official stats on teenagers

LTT has mentioned viewer demographics in previous wan shows. The actual data is paywalled so I can't show you hard facts. You disagree?

[crazzp]

1 hour ago, Blue4130 said:

LTT has mentioned viewer demographics in previous wan shows. The actual data is paywalled so I can't show you hard facts. You disagree?

If you cant support you claim with data then your claims are just wild guesses isnt it? LTT previous has a video which shows their demographics has gotten older with the majority coming from 25-34 years old. And that was 5 years ago.

[Blue4130]

1 hour ago, crazzp said:

If you cant support you claim with data then your claims are just wild guesses isnt it? LTT previous has a video which shows their demographics has gotten older with the majority coming from 25-34 years old. And that was 5 years ago.

5 years ago is ages in Youtube terms. He has more recently stated that they are skewing younger. Take it for what it's worth, by job is not to convince you of anything. If you find it worthless, so be it.

[cyndagon]

At the end of the day, Linus and his employees have built this channel from the ground up. They have enough experience to know what works and what doesn't. I don't think your 20 minutes of research is going to overcome practically a decade or more of experience.

Linus has a to of overhead between his workspaces and employees. He also has a reputation. At the end of the day Linus went the way of Metallica and other popular bands. They're "selling out" to capture the most viewership they can in order to make the most money they can. The content in the videos is still worth while 9 times out of 10 imo, if I need to deal with clickbaity titles that's fine because I know they've determined that to be the best way to keep their content going. I'm not a fan of it either, but it's a small price to pay.

If you don't like it, as one person suggested sub to floatplane and watch there. I've been watching Linus for almost 10 years now and will continue to watch and support because at the end of the day, I like the content. When I get home from work I have time to watch maybe 5 videos of various lengths all together, and I know Linus will more than likely be worth it to me (along with Throttle House btw if anyone's into cars. Shameless plug).

[Sauron]

My main point of contention with the current title style is that I often can't tell what the video is even about and that makes it very unlikely that I'll click on it. Nowadays I'm only really interested in a handful of things LTT covers (the rest feels kind of samey after over 10 years of content) and if I can't tell which videos cover those at a glance.

 

They do eventually update most of their titles to be more explicative but I'm not very likely to go back and check...

15 hours ago, crazzp said:

There may be two groups of people who may not click on the video if the title is obvious and states overclocking.

1. People who are not interested to overclock.

2. People who are masters and know everything about overclock.

 

LTT's strategy is to lure those who are curious to find out what LTT meant and then make them stay through their goofiness and dropping skills.

I doubt the video in question is a basic overclocking tutorial so even someone who is a "master" could very well be interested. If it's news and insight about a new product in relation to overclocking it would definitely be interesting for someone who's passionate about overclocking, it's not like past experience automatically gives you in depth knowledge of every new product that drops.

12 hours ago, Hairless Monkey Boy said:

Yup. They acquire the ADD addled masses, but lose people like me, the long time fans with a nominal attention span.

 

Honestly, it's probably a good trade considering I use AdBlock, and the ADD addled masses couldn't be bothered to.

I don't think you know what ADD is or how it works

[SprinkledDount]

23 hours ago, Watanabe said:

Linus' clickbait strategy objectively does not work.

This just seem like conjecture, what metric are you basing this off of? Because you are comparing two vastly differing channels based on a video from one of the channels, how you believe the YouTube algorithm works, and the view count of videos made in vastly different time frames.

 

23 hours ago, Watanabe said:

Veritassium last year did a video about clickbait titles and he showed that it didn't worked like people says, if you're curious about it you can check it here:

This seems like your only concrete proof that Linus' clickbate video titles aren't working. It looks like a solid video but you use this as the basis to why LTT's videos aren't performing well, and you go on to compare the two channels' per video view count.

 

23 hours ago, Watanabe said:

If Linus has seen that Veritasium video, he 100% missed the point. Here are the examples Veritasium gives of his clickbait videos that performed well:

 

Now compare those to some of Linus' recent videos:

 

The samples from both channels are wildly off, LTT's videos are from a month ago and earlier, but Veritasium's videos range from seven years ago to only about a year ago, with there being a couple significant gaps in time between some of them. This presents the issue that these videos from Vertasium are given the time amass views not only from the subscribers of the channel but from people outside of the channel too. 

 

This all leads to you saying that LTT's videos don't perform as well because the YouTube algorithm doesn't support clickbate titles when, in this post, there is little evidence outside of the three channels that you have highlighted, one of which has a some what clickbaity title.

On 10/4/2022 at 10:30 AM, Watanabe said:

Marques' thumbnail and title look like this:

 

 

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

1 minute ago, Sauron said:

I don't think you know what ADD is or how it works

I do, I was just being flippant. Your point is taken.

[Rex Hite]

Is click-bait even a  bad thing? If we have enough time to watch a video we surely have enough time to get part way into a video and turn it off if it's not what we want.

 

The click-bait thing seems a bit of a  "how dare they waste my time!" complaint, when that time is exactly the thing the viewer is intending to "waste" anyway.

 

 

[Just that Mario]

Just want to comment, that I hate LTT's titles as well. Their titles and thumbnails are so misleading at times it is stupid. Video title and thumbnail need to be about the video and also be truthful and informative. If they're going to have title "X CPU ALMOST BURNT DOWN THE STUDIO!" and then content is that CPU ran hot (within max limits) while stress testing, then in my book the title is a big FU to the viewers.

This has been most annoying about Apple product reviews/videos. Thumbnail and title are ALWAYS some bs "hurrdurr Apple bad" statement to get Apple haters and Android fanboy kids to click. Latest video was so bad I thought about signing in and reporting it as misinformation.

[Avocado Diaboli]

I find the justification funny that just because either of those channels focus on different topics that the comparison is therefore null and void. The implication being that tech enthusiasts are gullible enough to fall for clickbait, while people interested in scientific content are all rational and immune to clickbait.

On 10/4/2022 at 4:48 PM, Middcore said:

 

Veritasium uploads once or twice a month. LTT uploads basically every day, not even counting their secondary channels like TechLinked, Mac Address, etc. Their per-video numbers are not comparable.

 

Once you get a fuller picture, Veritasium is not more successful than LTT by any metric. So why should LTT follow Veritasium's model?

 

 

 

So we're not gonna talk about how Veritasium has under 400 videos compared to LTT's almost 6000 but still have drawn in over a third the amount of video views with less than a tenth of videos produced? Tell me again how clickbait actually functions if we were to scale up the actual production numbers and look at the returns. Because LTT's output sure seems like diminishing returns from that perspective.

[AryA_65]

On 10/5/2022 at 2:43 PM, Billbill said:

Some folks will call things clickbait just because they disagree with the content. 

I don’t think people hate the content, more so the title and thumbnail. It’s like getting a book, but the cover page and it’s title are on a different league compared to the story. Or imagine this, you go to ikea (because why not) and you buy one of their chairs, but you know no idea what it’s gonna look like or how big it is because they didn’t provide a display/demo model. Like, yeah you would know it’s a chair, but what the hell does it look like?

 

on the other hand, I like to think about the thumbnails and titles as the two sketche doodled characters from that one meme:

 

[FruitOfTheLum]

I'm fine with 'clickbaity' titles and silly expressions on thumbnails to a point, if the data shows that it helps the channel. Lately, some of LTTs videos have been venturing too far into the "eh?" side of the spectrum, though. There needs to be a happy medium. The "Time's Up, Apple!" link I'm looking at in the right-side of this very website as I type this is a perfect example of taking it too far - if I didn't already know about the EU compelling Apple to use USB-C, both the title and thumbnail would be completely meaningless to me, and I'd scroll right on by.

 

I would also like to very, very strongly point out that from an accessibility point of view (I don't know whether you care about such things in Canada), you can't rely on thumbnails to fill-in the blanks for your obscure titles, as the thumbnails are essentially invisible to certain visually impaired users (who can still listen to your content even if they can't see it).

 

[komar]

On 10/5/2022 at 6:51 PM, Rex Hite said:

Is click-bait even a  bad thing? If we have enough time to watch a video we surely have enough time to get part way into a video and turn it off if it's not what we want.

 

The click-bait thing seems a bit of a  "how dare they waste my time!" complaint, when that time is exactly the thing the viewer is intending to "waste" anyway.

 

 

Please try to look a bit deeper into the problem.

The content during the "glory days" was not only easy to understand from the title and thumbnail but also easy to find if you ever needed it again. I'm not an encyclopedia, remembering everything from every video + the stupid title its given so in the event I need it, I could find it easy.  And this is not only for personal use but pointing other people to said content.

 

I've tried to help people on the forum, asking stuff that has been answered in a video with details, but it proved impossible to find said video.....

 

As to "you cant compare the 2 channels cuz 1 has XXX videos and LTT has 6000 videos uploaded" is the very easy to see reason, why LS doesn't care for only getting at max 1/7 views/sub count and that is that every video uploaded ever daily gets more views. So he doesn't get the revenue of say 2m views a day, he probly gets 3-5-10mil views a day over all videos cuz YT will keep recommending them in the feeds, even crap you have already watched multiple times (f that jar of thermal paste honestly)

 

So yeah, quantity over quality is a strategy that works in a world where the dummer your content is, the better it does.

[Arika]

2 hours ago, Billbill said:

I just do not understand why someone would even take the time to complain about clickbait in the first place. Don't like the info then just don't read or watch it. 

Because complaints is what changes things. It shows the company that there is something wrong. 

In the case of LMG, if they started to notice views were dropping, I doubt they would say "I guess our titles and thumbnails are driving people away", no, it's more likely they would double down to get more clicks and views and get back to where they were. 

 

I dislike the whole "don't complain, just don't use/watch x" because it shuts down any critique and is low effort. 

Sure hope you never have issues with something, because you're not allowed to complain about it, just stop using it.