Netflix has become immersed with "clickbaitification"

Slate

Netflix, which is launching a show called Clickbait on Wednesday, has always designed its thumbnails to lure viewers to watch. But, says Dan Kois, this year the "company seems more brazen in its strategies, more willing to promise something and then absolutely fail to deliver, often using headline tricks familiar from the social web." The thumbnails also seem designed to be "blandly" sexier than ever, whether it's naked Tom Ellis in Lucifer or naked Sarah Shahi in Sex/Life. "In these late-pandemic days, there’s a woozy familiarity to the screen where we make most of our entertainment decisions," says Kois. "To anyone who’s ever written headlines for online media, Netflix looks familiar. As competitors begin to nip at the streaming giant’s heels, Netflix seems to be flirting with the tantalizing tools that web editors discovered a decade ago or more: the curiosity gap, the sexy thumbnail, the misleading image. A homepage is a homepage, after all, and these days, Netflix has discovered clickbait. Netflix has always been devoted to getting users to click on a show—and fast. The network’s own research shows that users consider each title for a whopping 1.8 seconds, and that if users don’t find anything in a minute and a half, they’re gone. In the battle against 'analysis paralysis,' the network is constantly experimenting with new ways to make items on the homepage as appealing as possible. And Netflix recognizes that artwork—the thumbnails they present—is crucial to that decision-making." He adds: "You might lazily click on a thumbnail for Sex/Life—featuring its beautiful central character gasping sweatily—not because you expect quality, exactly, but because you hope for a certain kind of breezy trash: Skinemax for the 21st century, with just a little bit of character development to help it go down easy. It might not even matter if it isn’t good. It just needs to satisfy the urge you felt when you clicked on it. But many of Netflix’s recent clickbait hits aren’t following through on their promises, implicit or explicit. Sex/Life is 'more soapy than sleazy,' as Slate’s Karen Han put it, larding its episodes with vanilla sex scenes but making that hot main character’s moral dilemmas so dull that the scenes are impossible to enjoy. What Lies Below offers neither great sea-monster sex nor actual thrills. Cripes, you can keep clicking through an entire season of Who Killed Sara?, 400 minutes of melodrama, only to … never find out who killed Sara! Tune in for Season 2, I guess. Living through the past decade in online news has made me a little suspicious of this particular kind of all-hat-and-no-cattle marketing. Take those titles-in-the-form-of-questions, for example. In their bluntness they beg an answer, and call to mind the 'curiosity gap' headlines that took over media in the mid 2010s, as every website tried to replicate the success of Upworthy: Someone Killed Sara. You’ll Never Believe Who It Was. Similarly, the blandly sexy thumbnail images are reminiscent of the most basic of chumboxes, those occasionally disturbing programmatic ads that take over the bottom of websites (including, at times, Slate) that need to scrape a little more revenue from their online real estate."