hackertube.io

Clickbait is Unreasonably Effective

Veritasium · commentary · Watch on YouTube

Product, marketing & salesInternet culture & memes

What it is

Veritasium explains why clickbait titles and thumbnails work, how he tests them, and why educational creators feel pushed to use them. He classifies types of clickbait and discusses the trade-offs.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN cites it whenever YouTube titles and thumbnails come up, both to defend creators and to criticize the drift toward clickbait.

  • 5 people recommended it
  • 5 different months
  • 0 strong recommendations
  • first 2021, last 2025

What HN commenters said

  1. “Veritasium does a great video on this.”

    Why creators constantly optimize titles and thumbnails

    overcast, 2021-08 · Recommendation · in “Fake animal rescue videos have become a new frontier for animal abuse”

  2. “Veritasium posted a brilliant way for optimizing thumbnails and headlines to improve click-through rate on Youtube”

    Optimizing thumbnails and headlines for click-through

    timdaub, 2021-11 · Recommendation · in “Tips For Making a Popular Open Source Project in 2021”

  3. “Derek of Veritaseum made a video laying out why "clickbait-y" titles like that are necessary, and I feel like it makes a pretty good case.”

    Makes a good case for why clickbait titles are necessary

    LordDragonfang, 2022-04 · Recommendation · in “I stopped working on black hole information loss”

  4. “His classification of clickbait into different types is also fascinating.”

    Creator perspective on clickbait and its purpose

    mierle, 2022-09 · Recommendation · in “The Next Chapter for Learning on YouTube”

  5. “I feel like his channel has actually blossomed since then.”

    Video preceded channel's improvement in quality

    jerf, 2023-09 · Recommendation · in “How the Most Useless Branch of Math Could Save Your Life”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: clickbait, thumbnails, youtube algorithm, veritasium, content creation

Also recommended by the same people