Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

February 15, 2015

The software behind this clickbait data visualization will blow your mind

Filed under: R,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 4:26 pm

The software behind this clickbait data visualization will blow your mind by David Smith.

From the post:

New media sites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy have mastered the art of "clickbait": headlines and content designed to drive as much traffic as possible to their sites. One technique is to use coy headlines like "If you take a puppy video break today, make sure this is the dog video you watch." (Gawker apparently spends longer writing a headline than the actual article.) But the big stock-in-trade is "listicles": articles that are, well, just lists of things. (Exactly half of Buzzfeed's top 20 posts of this week are listicles, including "32 Paintings Paired With Quotes From 'Mean Girls'".)

If your goal is to maximize virality, how long should a listicle be? Max Woolf, an R user and Bay Area Software QA Engineer, set out to answer that question with data. Buzzfeed reports the number of Facebook shares for each of its articles, so he scraped BuzzFeed’s website and counted the number of items in 15,656 listicles. He then used R's ggplot2 package to plot number of Facebook shares versus number of listicle items, and added a smooth line to show the relationship:

Not that I read Buzzfeed very often but at least the lists are true lists, you aren’t forced to load each item separately with ads each time. Not great curation but one item at a time display or articles broken into multiple parts for ad reasons are far more objectionable.

That said, if you are looking for shares on Facebook, take this as your guide to creating listicles. 😉

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