Communications in Humanities Research ISSN: 2753-7072
Home> Volumes> Volume CHR Vol.125> Article
Research Article

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

Yu Chang1,*, Xinyue Tan2, Jiayu Yue3
1. Mcmaster University
2. Qingdao Academy
3. University of Newcastle

* Corresponding author: [email protected]

Abstract

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.

Keywords: Clickbait; YouTube; User Engagement
Published: October 27, 2026
DOI: 10.54254/2753-7064/2026.38316
Volume: CHR Vol.125
pp. 109-118
Download PDF

References

  1. Chen, H. (2023). Title matters: Impacts of titles on user engagement in short video platforms [Doctoral dissertation, Singapore Management University]. InK@SMU. Singapore Management University repository.
  2. Jung, A.-K., Stieglitz, S., Kissmer, T., Mirbabaie, M., & Kroll, T. (2022). Click me…! The influence of clickbait on user engagement in social media and the role of digital nudging.PLOS ONE, 17(6), e0266743. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266743
  3. Loewenstein, G. (1994). The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation.Psychological Bulletin, 116(1), 75–98. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.116.1.75
  4. Molina, M. D., Sundar, S. S., Rony, M. M. U., Hassan, N., Le, T., & Lee, D. (2021). Does clickbait actually attract more clicks? Three clickbait studies you must read. InProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems(pp. 1–19). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445753
  5. Blom, J. N., & Hansen, K. R. (2015). Click bait: Forward-reference as lure in online news headlines.Journal of Pragmatics, 76, 87–100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.11.010
  6. Robertson, C. E., Pröllochs, N., Schwarzenegger, K., Pärnamets, P., Van Bavel, J. J., & Feuerriegel, S. (2023). Negativity drives online news consumption.Nature Human Behaviour, 7(5), 812–822. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01538-4
  7. Gligorić, K., Lifchits, G., West, R., & Anderson, A. (2023). Linguistic effects on news headline success: Evidence from thousands of online field experiments (Registered Report).PLOS ONE, 18(3), e0281682. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281682
  8. Cui, G., Chung, Y., Peng, L., & Wang, Q. (2024). Clicks for money: Predicting video views through a sentiment analysis of titles and thumbnails.Journal of Business Research, 183, 114849. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2024.114849
  9. He, Y., Guan, Z., & Liu, W. (2025). The interactive effects of title sentiment and length on video dissemination: Optimal length and the diminishing returns of emotion.Journal of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, 7(6), 30–40. https://doi.org/10.61784/jcsee3088
  10. Al-Ali, M. N., & Hamzeh, S. M. (2024). Extra cues extra views: A multimodal detection of Arabic clickbait thumbnail verbo-visual cues.Discourse & Communication, 18(1), 3–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/17504813231190332
  11. Kemm, R. (2022). The linguistic and typological features of clickbait in YouTube video titles.Social Communication, 23(1), 66–80. https://doi.org/10.2478/sc-2022-0007
  12. Nickl, P., Moussaïd, M., & Lorenz-Spreen, P. (2025). The evolution of online news headlines.Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12, 364. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-04514-7
  13. Kuiken, J., Schuth, A., Spitters, M., & Marx, M. (2017). Effective headlines of newspaper articles in a digital environment.Digital Journalism, 5(10), 1300–1314. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2017.1279978
  14. Zhao, L., Zhang, M., Ming, Y., Niu, T., & Wang, Y. (2023). The effect of image richness on customer engagement: Evidence from Sina Weibo.Journal of Business Research, 154, 113307. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2022.113307
  15. Kawata, T., Kato, T., & Tsuda, K. (2025). Effect of title length and word count on views: Evidence from Microsoft Excel videos on YouTube.EAI Endorsed Transactions on Scalable Information Systems, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.4108/eetsis.7779