If you’re on the Internet, you know clickbait. It’s often headlined with something that ends with, “You Won’t Believe What Happened!” or “He Never Imagined THIS!” And then you click through a series of slides and bring revenue to a company – possibly Diply here in London – whose owners get paid by the click. The more you click, the happier the ad placers are.Â
Facebook promised to crack down on clickbait by filtering it out of people’s timelines. I haven’t seen as much of it, so it must be working. But what if you subscribe to a collection of clickbait that you truly want to see?
That’s what happened with me and Hometalk. It has content I enjoy, but it’s arranged in a clickbait, slide-after-slide, format. So what’s a gal to do? I want to see how “She Used Plastic Spoons in a Way We Never Imagined!” or “Bet You Never Expected Toilet Paper Rolls Could Be Used for This!” Think of it as Houzz Lite. Plenty of the DIY crafts are too crafty for my liking. Some of them look like elementary school projects. But many of them are worth checking out, including furniture refinishing and clever ideas for disguising and upcycling things. The website also has a Q and A section where you can ask the DIY community their thoughts on a project. It’s clickbait but it isn’t spam. So, I reason, even click-baiters need to make a living. Click, click, click!