The Linguistic and Typological Features of Clickbait in Youtube Video Titles

Abstract

This exploratory study aims to identify which linguistic and typological features commonly associated with clickbait in online news headlines are indicative of clickbait in YouTube video titles. A comparative corpus analysis is conducted to compare YouTube video titles commonly associated with clickbait to titles not associated with clickbait. Results indicate that a majority of the typological and linguistic features associated with clickbait in online news headlines are found to be indicative of clickbait in YouTube video titles. However, the role which each of the features plays seems to differ to that of online news. The findings contribute to the understanding of clickbait in non-news contexts from a linguistics perspective, an area which has been relatively unexplored in the current literature.