The title doesn't seem like clickbait to me. Seems pretty straightforward really.
Now if they had written the second part of the title like, "You won't believe what happened next!" that would be clickbait.
Now if they had written the second part of the title like, "You won't believe what happened next!" that would be clickbait.
If you'd like to clearly differentiate it from a more stringent definition of clickbait, I guess one could call it clickbait by omission.
It's like when you pretend to have thrown a nut to a squirrel, but in reality you just made a gesture. The squirrel will go look for the nut regardless. You not throwing a 'decoy' nut isn't the important part w.r.t. the desired outcome. You still 'baited' them.
Anything that leads to a reader/viewer asking "Why?/What?", and which triggers the human curiosity that leads to a click - constitutes clickbait.
Such content may later disappoint or cause annoyance to the reader/viewer; but they still clicked, which is all that matters.
They could have, but that’s background information supporting the article’s topic, not its findings. You and several others will walk away with that finding from their research, and I will walk away having read and understood the interest in better understanding how attrition affects outcomes. I wouldn’t have any clue that I could learn that from the title you suggest. If they’d tried to cram the point of interest I found into the title, it would be derided as editorializing. The title is probably the best they could do: we had a hypothesis. Implicit in that is some findings and some further line of questioning. Sure that’s “clickbait” in a literal sense, but it’s a title. If you could fit the article in the title you wouldn’t have a distinction between articles and titles. You’d have tweet. Just one. Choose your wording carefully!
Is so common it must be in some clickbait 101 subreddit wiki