Here's why they don't work:
- If I respect a publication and feel that the content has value for me, I'll happily subscribe.
- If I click on a clickbait headline only to arrive at a paywall, it's like a small and unpleasant electric shock, punishing me for clicking the link.
- Paywall creators think that the combination of clickbait and paywalls is magical and gets people to subscribe, but it does not, it only creates negative emotion and irritation.
- There is no such thing as a free lunch. If publishers want subscribers they need to consistently produce high quality content day after day, week after week. They also need to forego the sugar high of clickbait.
- That means there can't be some sort of social virality genius telling the editor how to title articles and showing charts of all the clicks from Reddit, etc. Doing this may generate some incremental subscribers, but it does so at the cost of the publication's brand image.
- The approach Salon used of showing the first third or half of the article is better than a "You obviously love great journalism" banner. Let the content stand on its own and earn the subscription.
- I have not been able to bring myself to subscribe to the NYT or WaPo for one simple reason -- around half of the articles they publish are very low quality and many have clickbait headlines. The article headlines have the feel of being ads themselves that falsely represent the content of the article. In many cases the articles are pretty solid reporting, but the headlines oversell them as being the article that will bring down the Trump presidency.
If I were a journalist I'd be pretty outraged if I took the time to write a thoughtful article and then some virality genius retitled it something silly and tribe-oriented to get the shallowest of readers to thoughtlessly click it.