Once headed for a bland retirement within newspapers, the headline is making a striking comeback online, where tabloid come-ons increasingly convert to fame and fortune.
In its revived form, the headline is finding relevance far beyond news media as it becomes a key weapon in fields like politics and business. No longer the exclusive province of copy editors, it is now the cornerstone of emailed political appeals, the fulcrum of crowdsourcing capital on Kickstarter, and arguably the basis of an entire communications medium, the all-headlines microblogging system Twitter.
A new vanguard of hype masters is testing the limits of the headline’s power, hoping to accelerate the democratization of media, capital flows, and even political messaging. They rewrite headlines dozens of times for a single post; they build software to automatically compare the performance of competing headlines in real time; and they find ways to convert clicks to piles of money.
"There is something going on with headlines; they are way more important now than they were for a while. If I can notice it, others with far more invested would too." -- Jay Rosen “Though there are many fewer newspapers, we all speak headlines now,” says Tom Leonard, a longtime professor specializing in journalism history and campus librarian for the University of California, Berkeley. “Hilary Clinton [recently] asked Americans to pay more attention to the trend lines than the headlines on the Middle East. How quaint but appropriate. Newspaper headlines are getting less play than ever, but we feel overwhelmed by headlines nonetheless.”
New York-based Upworthy is part of a gamble by founders from Facebook, Reddit, and BuzzFeed that headlines can advance political change and profits at the same time. The aggregator, whose seed round closed this past October, makes editors write at least 25 different headlines for each post, then plugs top contenders into alternate versions of of its Facebook page and website to test which one elicits the maximum reaction.
“The headline is our one chance to reach people who have a million other things that they're thinking about, and who didn't wake up in the morning wanting to care about feminism or climate change, or the policy details of the election,” says co-founder Peter Koechley. “The difference between a good headline and a bad headline can be just massive. It’s not a rounding error. When we test headlines we see 20% difference, 50% difference, 500% difference. A really excellent headline can make something go viral.”
Koechley honed his headline skills as managing editor at The Onion, the humor publication that distills a torrent of staff-submitted heads into a handful of weekly articles and shorts. At Upworthy his top-trafficked entries include “If This Video Makes You Uncomfortable, Then You Make Me Uncomfortable,” attached to a pro-gay marriage video, and “Move Over, Barbie — You’re Obsolete,” which promoted a construction kit to encourage young girls to become engineers.
One of Koechley's brothers in arms, Democratic digital consultant Joe Rospars, says he doesn't even send an email on behalf of clients without running a battery of tests with dozens of variations designed largely to optimize the subject line. The right one, he explains, can easily quintuple engagement. With Rospars as chief digital strategist, the Obama campaign became famous for provocative e-mail headers like "I will be outspent," "Some scary numbers," and "Do this for Michelle."
“Subject lines matter a ton,” Rospars says. “As campaigns especially, but also organizations and brands more generally, become prolific content producers themselves, they're paying much more attention... The key is to keep finding new ways to engage people with your content by being playful with the creative and ruthless with the testing.”
Catchy blog posts and emails are also starting to grow more important in the startup world, where platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter allow business ventures to engage in the sort of broad-based fundraising formerly restricted to politics. That shift has also bolstered the role of online gathering places like Hacker News and Techcrunch, which no longer just carry word of funding rounds; they now host direct financial appeals.
It took just two provocative blog posts to catapult Dalton Caldwell’s budding microblog platform App.net to $750,000 in pledges, 30,000 paying subscribers and more than 100 third-party apps. The serial tech entrepreneur's personal blog posts “What Twitter could have been” and “Announcing an audacious proposal” garnered 531 votes on Hacker News and more than 80,000 pageviews.
“The key is to keep finding new ways to engage people with your content by being playful with the creative and ruthless with the testing." -- Joe Rospars “My blog post played a very large role in the success of my project,” Caldwell says. “My takeaway is that words and ideas actually matter.”
“Different headlines can dramatically affect the popularity of an article,” he adds. “I was aware that the proposal was pretty crazy, so I tried to think of a word that got that point across that didn't contain negative connotations, hence ‘audacious.”
Such headline calibration is especially important on crowdfunding platforms. The top dozen 2012 campaigns on Indiegogo, for example, included “Let’s Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum” and “Who Gives A Crap – toilet paper that builds toilets.” And Kickstarter’s 2012 hits included headlines that would be at home on a blog for obsessive fans: “Ministry of Supply: The Future of Dress Shirts,” “Penny Arcade Sells Out,” “Oculus Rift: Step Into the Game,” and “To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure.”
None of this is to say that a catchy headline or smartly-written blog post is all that’s needed for success in online fundraising. It helps to have a track record and, perhaps more important, an audience -- which most entrepreneurs lack. “Grinding stuff out takes a year at *least* to get any kind of audience at all,” says Jeff Atwood, who with fellow programmer-cum-writer Joel Spolsky parlayed popular blogs into the successful web Q&A startup Stack Exchange. “We get up on [our] fame soapbox and announce our things. That won't work for J. Random Blogger, will it?”
Perhaps not, but thanks to crowdfunding and the overabundance of venture capital, J. Random Blogger has a big incentive these days to turn into J. Modestly Popular Blogger.
“I can share something on Twitter with the wrong headline and it goes nowhere; with the right one it takes off,” says NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen. “If I can notice it, others with far more invested than I would [too]... There is something going on with headlines that's different -- I think they are way more important now than they were for a while"
Interestingly, the news media, having pioneered the aggressive headline, now warn of the dangers of overreach. At BuzzFeed, a website famous for its baiting headlines, writers can enter multiple titles and the publishing software will test them against one another to figure out which garners the most clicks. The Awl's Choire Sicha recently cataloged some of patterns that have emerged from these sorts of experiments, including heads that start with "Watch this," "Meet the," "Here's the," and "Take a Break and..."
BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti claims his editors have learned to be careful to convey the true essence of an article rather than just going for traffic.
“Headlines optimization is a dangerous game,” Peretti says. “Realtime click data causes many publishers to over-optimize and manipulate readers into clicking stories they don't actually want to read... In most cases it would be better for readers if the information was included in the headline so you only click if you actually are interested in reading the whole story.”
It remains to be seen whether this lesson will trickle down to the tabloid headline’s most recent adopters; favoring long-term trust over short-term gains is not something politicians and businessmen are known for. In the meantime, the bankability of a clever head is only growing.
