Click Here If You Want to Be Sad
The internet loves bad news. And that’s bad.
Last week, I saw a new paper in the journal Nature Human Behavior called “Negativity Drives Online News Consumption.” That seems bad, I thought. Naturally, I clicked.
In a randomized study of 105,000 headlines and 370 million impressions from a data set of articles published by the online news dispensary Upworthy, researchers concluded that each negative word increased the click-through rate by more than 2 percent. “The presence of positive words in a news headline significantly decreases the likelihood of a headline being clicked on,” they said.
Are you even remotely surprised by any of this? Probably not. Neither was New York University’s Claire E. Robertson, a co-author of the paper. “People have been saying ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ for decades,” she told me. But what does that actually mean? Maybe substantively bad news naturally gets more attention, as it probably should. Or, maybe, even humdrum and unimportant stories can be juiced to attract eyes and ears if editors inject their headlines with a dose of sadness and catastrophe.