Investigating Clickbait Strategies: A CDA of Pakistani YouTube News Channels

Abstract

YouTube offers earning opportunity for the content creators and current affairs news get an advantage to be watched. The content creators prefer to use particular linguistic choices and designing on thumbnails that could convince the audience to click and watch. This study aims to investigate those click-bait strategies by applying qualitative methodology. For a comprehensive analysis, we have modified a CDA model presented by Bazaco, Redondo and Sánchez-García (2019). The data contains 36 news headlines randomly selected from six YouTube channels. At first level, we look at i) absence of the most important information, ii) unanswered questions iii) using question marks with simple sentences iv) deliberate ambiguity. At second level, we analyzed i) the styles of interrogation at sentence level, ii) the presentation of additional sentences or phrases that are specifically used to add sensationalism in those headlines. The study reveals that the news headlines on YouTube thumbnails are recreated from the main stream media, and commonly follow a question-style to add curiosity. Moreover, specific linguistic items, i.e., adjectives and adverbs are used to encourage people for clicking the certain links. This research may be beneficial to aware the general public to avoid clicking irrelevant or ambiguous news headlines that are written to generate website traffic. Furthermore, the young researchers interested in Critical Discourse Studies may explore other social media platforms for such analyses.