A few months ago I put YouTube on my TV and started jotting down the headlines as I scrolled.
Not to study them, but to see what I’d been mindlessly absorbing. A sample:
- “Navy SEAL reveals single most important truth to staying alive.”
- “To not be broke by 27, do THIS.”
- “Watch out. The world will end in 2027.”
I stared at the list for a while and finally muttered a “WTF” under my breath. There is literally no information in any of those headlines. None! They tell you nothing about what you’ll learn, who’s teaching it, or why it matters.
They exist for one reason: to trigger a click.
Remember when headlines actually said something? As a young marketer, I was taught to write headlines that had hooks, sure. But at least my readers and listeners knew what the article was about:
“Navy SEAL shares three mindset principles for handling pressure” has nutritional value. You can decide if you want it before you click.
Value, at least in how ideas are shared and packaged, has been stripped out entirely.
We’ve Left the Library for the Tabloid Aisle
I live on Main Street in my town and walk around a lot. One of my favorite places to work out of is our local public library. It’s almost always empty.
Step into the proverbial tabloid aisle of social media and there’s a never-ending line of people, gawking and gaping.
Social media is the supermarket tabloid of our generation.
The food industry spent the last century stripping flour of every trace of fiber and nutrition, then turning what was left into the basis of our cereals, pastas, breads, and pastries. Processed, palatable, addictive, empty.
We’ve done the exact same thing with content. What’s left is pure sugar: sensational, forgettable, engineered for one swallow and zero sustenance. That didn’t happen by accident. People engineered it, and those people are getting paid for every empty click.
BuzzFeed created an entire staff discipline around it: “headline doctors” whose only job was to retitle content for maximum clicks.
Upworthy rode pure headline optimization to 90 million monthly visitors by late 2013, more traffic than the New York Times. When Facebook changed its algorithm to penalize deceptive headlines, they lost three quarters of their audience.
At The Guardian’s Changing Media Summit in 2015, co-founder Peter Koechley took the stage and said, “We sort of unleashed a monster. Sorry for that. Sorry we kind of broke the internet last year.”
(I hope this pisses you off as much as it does me.)
This is the playbook: strip mine resources, collect millions on the back end, and when the damage is done, issue a sheepish apology, walk away rich.
The monster didn’t go away when this guy said sorry. It just moved into every platform, every feed, every thumbnail. It became the way content works. (Facebook has, of course, done a 180 and gone all in on deceptive headlines.)
Back then, headlines were the name of the game. Now, social media is a visual-first platform. Headlines don’t need to describe anything because images carry all the attention. Words downgraded from being descriptive to purely trigger-based.
Words used to carry the freight, now they’re just along for the ride.
Some people may say, “Get with the program, Mike. More clicks are better! Grab eyeballs and let God (or a sales funnel) sort ‘em out!”
All Views Count the Same. That’s a Problem.
Consider this: YouTube doesn’t weight the views on your video based on who is watching it. If some smart person, say astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, watches your video, it counts as one view. If such a person (fill in any person you admire) watched or read any of your content, you might be genuinely happy.
If the guy you went to high school with who peaked at 17 watches or reads your stuff, that also counts as one view.
Astrophysicist vs. Biff from Back to the Future? The algorithm treats them exactly the same.
Turns out there are a lot more of the latter than the former. If you want to optimize your thinking, creating, and business for this guy, be my guest:
All this means that the content that “wins” today by the metrics of views and clicks must appeal to the broadest, lowest common denominator.
I’m not referring just to the lowest denominator of humanity in general (sure, Biffs are people too) but the lowest denominator of each individual human: at their most tired, most depleted state, doomscrolling on the couch, too exhausted to read anything nourishing, reaching for the digital cereal box.
More clicks is not better.
What you probably want is the right person choosing to come back, week after week, because they trust your voice. That is not a click, it is a relationship. Two completely different things, built by two completely different strategies. One requires pomp and circumstance, the other requires patience and depth.
The Tabloidization of the Internet is the first of three forces I see at play that are reshaping what it means to build trust, credibility, and a body of work in this era.
Part 2 of 3 lands next Tuesday: what I’m calling “Visibility Fatigue,” compounded by AI that makes anyone sound like an expert and makes it harder than ever to stand out.
For now, make time for this: Open your phone, scroll, and pay attention to what you’ve actually been absorbing.
Ask yourself: is this where I want to be spending my attention? Is this where I want my work to compete?
I often wonder how much time I’ve spent on scrolling that I could have used in better ways, building what only I can build, reading things that could really shape me for the better.
Hit reply if any of this landed… I’m curious where you’re seeing it in your world.
Mike Kim
Tuesday, April 21, 2026
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