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Comment by Kluny | Hacker News Reader

So you make a clickbait title with a snippet of text and see if people click? And then if they click, they get... what? Clearly not the article, since you haven't written it yet. This sounds like a good way to irritate people. So then you write the article that got the most clicks and present it to the same target audience, who scratches their head and thinks, "Hmm... didn't I click on a link about that story last month? And wasn't it a scam of some kind?"

Trust is hard to earn and instantly lost. Does priceonomics have some idea of how to prevent that?

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They prevent that by hosting it somewhere that no one can find it's associated with you. Not saying that's ethical, but it does prevent immediate harm to your brand, unless people somehow remembered on clicking the link when they see the actual article. (Which would still be a tiny fraction.)

I don't think that's enough, to be honest. I mean, people in various demographics all kind of get their news from the same places - reddit (various subreddits), the verge, vox, breitbart, fox, whatever your flavor is, your target audience can be found there on the regular. I'd be hesitant to test an article idea on, for example, cracked.com, then publish the real thing on /r/pcmasterrace. If I'm writing for that audience, I'd expect them to be in both places and I'd expect them to remember.

I dunno man, the internet is a pretty big place. If you're hitting the level of popularity with this stuff that of the people who see your first fake news article, a significant portion of them then see it when it's published in an unrelated place the next month then this whole discussion might be moot.

My guess is the math works out. As they said $10 isn't a great amount of people, and if you're after less than 4% CTR then the overlap is probably negligible. While Priceonomics makes an effort to appear as though it respects your intelligence, and its adverts are cited by almost every major news source, it is ultimately a showboating supertrawler. Check out 'The Tragic Data on Selfie Deaths' which makes a long form argument about a viral topic while getting its data from a google search and a particularly bad wikipedia list.

> This sounds like a good way to irritate people.

Definitely, and it seems like an evil version of this is already happening in my Facebook news feed. Occasionally there are some interesting looking articles (non-spammy headline, interesting story blurb), but when I click through to the "article" it's just the story blurb I already read, except it's buried in a sea of shitty, irrelevant ads and popovers that ask me to subscribe to something.

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