If you do watch YouTube a lot, there’s a good chance you stumbled upon some random content that promises big on its titles, but turned out to be unexciting at best, and completely different topic at worst. That’s an example of ‘clickbait’, and the video-sharing platform is starting to take this issue seriously. (And yes, I purposefully put the rainbow frame on this article’s thumbnail image to remind you readers.)
Clickbaiters Beware – YouTube Is Coming After You
“We’re planning to increase our enforcement against videos where the title or thumbnail promises viewers something that the video doesn’t deliver. This is especially important when the video covers topics like breaking news or current events, ensuring viewers aren’t misled about what they watch on YouTube,” the company wrote in its blog post.
The blog post did make it quite clear that the kind of clickbait it considers offensive is ‘egregious clickbait’. To be clear, both YouTube and its creators rely on clickbait thumbnails and titles to some degree to entice users to click on their videos for benign reasons. There’s a reason the term “YouTube Face” exists (which I’m personally not a fan of) – in case you didn’t know, here’s a great article explaining it in detail.
But to the fellow gamer audience out there: if you ever remember the channel “MrBossFTW”, infamous for publishing unsubstantiated claims of GTA VI for many years – that’s the textbook example of what ‘egregious clickbait’ looks like. YouTube defines it as videos that “includes promises or claims that aren’t delivered within the video itself,” and provides two examples:
– A video title saying “the president resigned!” where the video doesn’t address the president’s resignation.
– A thumbnail that says “top political news” on a video that doesn’t include any news coverage.
YouTube says it’ll slowly begin its enforcement in India first “over the coming months,” and any offending (new) videos will be taken down, though without a strike applied for now to allow the creators to accommodate the policy change. Today, channels on the platform can sustain up to two strikes, and gets permanently banned if it get struck for the third time.
Pokdepinion: Too many years overdue – but I welcome this. Hopefully we can get the whole ‘YouTube Face’ thing sorted next.
