Don't click on this post!

The single most important metric that powers the spread of content on the internet is click through rate. Click through rate or CTR is the percentage of people who see a post or video or link that click on it. It doesn’t matter if the content is correct. It doesn’t matter if the content is valuable to the reader.

How your hand feels when you see a post you can’t ignore?

In fact blatantly incorrect information will have high click-through rate and high engagement because people have a strong emotional reaction to incorrect content. They want to engage - to explain why the post was wrong.

When I was in school, I remember writing into a textbook company because there was a typo in the book. One of the answer keys had an incorrect answer. I wanted to tell them that they were wrong, that my answer was right. Would I have spent the time and effort to let them know that all of the answers were right? Of course not.

This is one of the reasons that extreme ideas are so easy to spread on the internet. Extreme ideas spark emotional reactions from both sides. Both groups, the people who agree and the the people who disagree feel compelled to engage with the content.

Social media algorithms long ago stopped showing everyone all of the content in chronological order and moved to an engagement model. Posts that perform well are showed to more people. Performing well doesn’t mean the post is more true or more meaningful, it just means that it caused people to react.

I’ll make two versions of this post. One with this title, and one with a more bland and descriptive title and let you know which one performed better. Any bets?