Results from clicking lots of clickbait: mostly BS and a bit of malware

[Spork829]

For a story on my school's journalism website I wanted to investigate just how toxic and malicious clickbait articles on popular sites actually are. A couple people here showed interest so I thought I would post the results here as well.

I went to 10 sites: Anandtech.com, Techcrunch.com, Arstechnica.com, Endgadget.com, Denverpost.com (local here), CNN.com, Foxnews.com, NBCnews.com, ABCnews.com, and Theguardian.com. All of these display "sponsored links" or "from around the web" sections full of clickbait. I clicked on the first story I saw on each site, and then the first 5 clickbait "articles" there for a total or 50.

 

Out of those 50: 21 contained more links to clickbait articles, 18 had misleading headlines that did not accurately describe the topic of the article, 9 were over two year old pages though they were labeled “new” or “trending”, 2 attempted to infect the computer with malware, 11 exhibited none of these offenses and were actually legitimate, harmless articles, and one never loaded and appeared to be a broken link.

 

Obviously it was mostly what I expected, except for the two times a site attempted to download malware. 

 

The first, surprisingly and a little sadly, was from Anandtech. The headline read “This one weird trick is the number one reason computers run slow”. It was actually a download page for a most untrustworthy looking “computer cleanup” program. To verify its illegitimacy I went ahead and downloaded and ran it (I was using a PC I don't care about that was blocked off from the rest of the network, just in case). The program certainly did not help clean up the system as it claimed, and slowed it down so much that I couldn’t even navigate to the control panel to uninstall it and was forced to completely wipe the hard drive and reinstall Windows. Given this PC has a Core 2 Duo E4400 and 4GB memory. 

The other was from CNN. The headline read “Shocking photos released by ex-White House employees”. It turned out just to be some regular old candid photos of President Obama and his family. After viewing this page for about fifteen seconds, I was redirected to a page asking me to download a program so that I may take a survey about my Comcast internet service. It was quite obviously not actually from Comcast. The program it installed took up about 10% of the computer’s resources, but didn’t do anything else noticeable. Therefore I assume that the point of this virus was to remain unnoticed by the typical user, and most likely connected the computer to a botnet. I also formatted after this one just to be safe. 

So...yeah. Take all that as you will. 

[airdeano]

newspapers and magazines used to be about the articles and minimal advertising, television due to its newness, had limited live commercials, telephones didn't have SPAM calls, and snail mail was limited to local advertising.

 

years gone-by and the masses grew and an idea was screw the coverage, we can make more capital profit from advertising per piece delivered to actually doing what the goal of the publication was derived. and the main-stem came from lack of circulation. many found out that the readers of the publication were moving on to the next platform and the publication still had gross receipts to pay. once enough of the circulation dropped-off, the publication was absorbed (mailing list) or dwindled into ashes

 

now comes email and the internet. information now era. paid per clicks (whether the content was relatable) to promote a profitable business versus the viewership (unneeded as redirected traffic is the norm) of content is not a easily kept community. so they have to rely on traffic shaping to register the income needed to survive.

 

new trapsters of the internet will click on those ads, moderately sauvey will unintentionally click one, experienced will not click and expert just ignore the efforts.

i avoid those that wish to deregulate their ad sources to clutter their integrity.

 

the internet was to be an ability to exchange information in a quick/up-to-date way. marketing saw it as a way to make it profitable and sold the content creators a way of thinking to generate lifestyles through the power of 'knowledge' instead got changed to a box of tide clothes detergent.

 

like most things, the intentions were there, but have some accessibility and marketing will find you out to point you to their ways of 'reap the benefits of your content, but pay us first' schedule. and now it is the norm to be interrupted from your regular schedule to bring you the latest in undergarmet urine/fecal capture devices or the latest celebrity doing some boneheaded thing and making it a worldly topic for 15-30min stretched to 48hrs or until they can get booked on some talk show to analyse their feelings on being propelled into the limelight furthering stupidity until something else better/fail comes along and the human attention cycle starts again.

 

take-away, nice stats, figured as well and soon i will be selling robot insurance.

[Spork829]

11 hours ago, wrathoftheturkey said:

They're called ads, m8. There's perfectly legitimate clickbait out there, it's the fishy ads that get you. You did use a VM, right? So you didn't get that crap on your PC? 

 

This, people, is why we have adblock.

I used a totally separate PC actually