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An annoying form of clickbait on YouTube

Because getting huge amounts of views on YouTube is actually quite profitable (if your channel can be monetized), it's no surprising that there are hundreds and hundreds of tactics that people use to try to get as many views as possible. Some of these tactics are completely legit, with the author trying to put as much effort as possible into making high-quality enjoyable popular videos. Other tactics are outright scams (even if they technically speaking don't break the terms of service.) Then there are the borderline ones.

One of the borderline tactics I have seen, which is a quite annoying form of clickbait, is used by several channels that upload "recaps" of movies.

What's so "clickbaity" about them? The fact that the title of the video contains an enticing summary of what the movie is about, in a manner that picks up the curiosity and interest of people, but nowhere in the title, and usually not even in the video's description, is the name of the movie mentioned. The only way to see the title of the movie, to know which movie it is, is to start watching the video, because it only appears in there.

This is quite obviously done deliberately: Videos don't get marked views unless people actually play them (in other words, if you just open the video in a new tab, most if not all modern browsers will not autoplay it. You have to switch to that tab and explicitly click on the video (or its "play" button) in order to start it.)

In case you are just curious about the name of the video but don't want to give this borderline-scammy thing a view, you can hover the seek bar of the video and YouTube will show a thumbnail of that part, and usually the title will be large enough to be able to read it. However, the vast majority of people won't do that and will just play the video, giving it a view.

This is quite clearly a very traditional form of clickbait (which has been the bane of the internet for over 20 years now): Inducing the people to click (and in this case play) using dubious tactics in order to get engagement.

A more honest channel would just put the name of the movie in the title of the video.

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