Exploring Clickbait on YouTube: Typologies, Engagement, and Content Moderation

Clickbait is commonly applied on YouTube to capture users' interest; however, it is impossible to estimate clickbait efficiency solely through clicks because there are other components of user engagement such as likes, comments, shares, watch time, viewer retention, and many others. This research paper aims to investigate how different types of clickbait impact user engagement on YouTube and whether the effect is influenced by content category. Systematic literature review was performed to analyze existing studies devoted to clickbait, online engagement, headlines features, video content. It focuses on three main types of clickbait: Curiosity Gap, Emotional Clickbait and Exaggeration Clickbait. It became clear from the review that these kinds of clickbait have different impacts on user engagement. So, Curiosity Gap clickbait can promote users to click on videos through generating an information gap; Emotional Clickbait – to engage users due to provoking emotions; Exaggeration Clickbait – to attract the users initially, but later demotivate them from engaging deeply since their expectations will not be fulfilled. Moreover, it became evident that the effect is influenced by content category. For instance, entertainment and lifestyle videos may react positively to emotional and exaggerated clickbait; educational and technological – more credibly and accurately. In general, it seems that clickbait can be useful in attracting user attention, but it is not always influential regarding deep engagement.