{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,4]],"date-time":"2026-07-04T06:59:01Z","timestamp":1783148341840,"version":"3.54.6"},"reference-count":57,"publisher":"Emerald","issue":"3","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2020,3,13]],"date-time":"2020-03-13T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1584057600000},"content-version":"tdm","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/www.emerald.com\/insight\/site-policies"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["INTR"],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2020,5,18]]},"abstract":"<jats:sec><jats:title content-type=\"abstract-subheading\">Purpose<\/jats:title><jats:p>The purpose of this study is to unpack the antecedents and consequences of clickbait prevalence in online media at two different levels, namely, (1) Headline-level: what characteristics of clickbait headlines attract user clicks and (2) Publisher-level: what happens to publishers who create clickbait on a prolonged basis.<\/jats:p><\/jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type=\"abstract-subheading\">Design\/methodology\/approach<\/jats:title><jats:p>To test the proposed conjectures, the authors collected longitudinal data in collaboration with a leading company that operates more than 500 WeChat official accounts in China. This study proposed a text mining framework to extract and quantify clickbait rhetorical features (i.e. hyperbole, insinuation, puzzle, and visual rhetoric). Econometric analysis was employed for empirical validation.<\/jats:p><\/jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type=\"abstract-subheading\">Findings<\/jats:title><jats:p>The findings revealed that (1) hyperbole, insinuation, and visual rhetoric entice users to click the baited headlines, (2) there is an inverted <jats:italic>U<\/jats:italic>-shaped relationship between the number of clickbait headlines posted by a publisher and its visit traffic, and (3) this non-linear relationship is moderated by the publisher's age.<\/jats:p><\/jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type=\"abstract-subheading\">Research limitations\/implications<\/jats:title><jats:p>This research contributes to current literature on clickbait detection and clickbait consequences. Future studies can design more sophisticated methods for extracting rhetorical characteristics and implement in different languages.<\/jats:p><\/jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type=\"abstract-subheading\">Practical implications<\/jats:title><jats:p>The findings could aid online media publishers to design attractive headlines and develop clickbait strategies to avoid user churn, and help managers enact appropriate regulations and policies to control clickbait prevalence.<\/jats:p><\/jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type=\"abstract-subheading\">Originality\/value<\/jats:title><jats:p>The authors propose a novel text mining framework to quantify rhetoric embedded in clickbait. This study empirically investigates antecedents and consequences of clickbait prevalence through an exploratory study of WeChat in China.<\/jats:p><\/jats:sec>","DOI":"10.1108\/intr-09-2019-0373","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2020,3,13]],"date-time":"2020-03-13T08:34:31Z","timestamp":1584088471000},"page":"1043-1058","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":33,"title":["Seeing is not always believing: an exploratory study of clickbait in WeChat"],"prefix":"10.1108","volume":"30","author":[{"given":"Wenping","family":"Zhang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Wei","family":"Du","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Yiyang","family":"Bian","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-7101-7999","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Chih-Hung","family":"Peng","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Qiqi","family":"Jiang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"140","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2020,3,13]]},"reference":[{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref001","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Ajzen, I. (1985), \u201cFrom intentions to actions: a theory of planned behavior\u201d, in Kuhl, J. and Beckmann, J. (Eds), Action Control, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 11-39.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-642-69746-3_2"},{"issue":"1","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref002","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"35","DOI":"10.1207\/S15327663JCP1201_04","article-title":"Suspense and advertising responses","volume":"12","year":"2002","journal-title":"Journal of Consumer Psychology"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref003","first-page":"541","article-title":"We used neural networks to detect clickbaits: you won't believe what happened next!","year":"2017"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref057","unstructured":"Babu, A., Liu, A. and Zhang, J. (2017), \u201cNew Updates to Reduce Clickbait Headlines\u201d, available at: https:\/\/about.fb.com\/news\/2017\/05\/news-feed-fyi-new-updates-to-reduce-clickbait-headlines\/ (accessed 17 May 2017)."},{"issue":"2","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref004","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"154","DOI":"10.1080\/21670811.2017.1345645","article-title":"Fake news and the economy of emotions: problems, causes, solutions","volume":"6","year":"2018","journal-title":"Digital Journalism"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref005","first-page":"364","article-title":"Clickbait titles: risky formula for attracting readers and advertisers","year":"2017"},{"issue":"1","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref006","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"96","DOI":"10.1080\/10510970309363268","article-title":"Rhetorical theory as message reception: a cognitive response approach to rhetorical theory and criticism","volume":"54","year":"2003","journal-title":"Communication Studies"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref007","first-page":"94","article-title":"8 amazing secrets for getting more clicks: detecting clickbaits in news streams using article informality","year":"2016"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref008","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"47","DOI":"10.1016\/j.jebo.2016.07.006","article-title":"The importance of suspense and surprise in entertainment demand: evidence from Wimbledon","volume":"130","year":"2016","journal-title":"Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization"},{"issue":"2","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref009","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"97","DOI":"10.1002\/jrsm.12","article-title":"A basic introduction to fixed-effect and random-effects models for meta-analysis","volume":"1","year":"2010","journal-title":"Research Synthesis Methods"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref010","unstructured":"Cao, X. and Le, T. (2017), \u201cMachine learning based detection of clickbait posts in social media\u201d, available at: https:\/\/arxiv.org\/pdf\/1710.01977.pdf (accessed 1 April 2018)."},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref011","first-page":"416","article-title":"Attention savings and emoticons usage in BBS","year":"2009"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref012","first-page":"9","article-title":"Stop clickbait: detecting and preventing clickbaits in online news media","year":"2016"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref013","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Chen, Y., Conroy, N.J. and Rubin, V.L. (2015), \u201cMisleading online content: recognizing clickbait as false news\u201d, Proceedings of the 2015 ACM on Workshop on Multimodal Deception Detection, ACM, Seattle, pp. 15-19.","DOI":"10.1145\/2823465.2823467"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref014","volume-title":"Applied Multiple regression\/Correlation Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences","year":"2003"},{"issue":"2\/3","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref015","first-page":"66","article-title":"Money under fire: the ethics of revenue generation for oppositional news outlets","volume":"13","year":"2016","journal-title":"The International Journal of Communication Ethics"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref016","first-page":"1794","article-title":"Discover breaking events with popular hashtags in Twitter","year":"2012"},{"issue":"3","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref017","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"21","DOI":"10.3991\/ijoe.v15i03.9843","article-title":"An effective approach for clickbait detection based on supervised machine learning technique","volume":"15","year":"2019","journal-title":"International Journal of Online Engineering"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref018","first-page":"432","article-title":"Rhetorical strategies in advertising","volume":"12","year":"1985","journal-title":"North American Advances in Consumer Research"},{"issue":"6","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref019","first-page":"18","article-title":"Salvation? The embattled newspaper business is betting heavily on web advertising revenue to secure its survival. But that wager is hardly a sure thing","volume":"29","year":"2007","journal-title":"American Journalism Review"},{"issue":"1","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref020","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1","DOI":"10.1016\/S1057-7408(08)80042-3","article-title":"On the development and strength of category\u2013brand associations in memory: the case of mystery ads","volume":"1","year":"1992","journal-title":"Journal of Consumer Psychology"},{"issue":"1","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref021","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"21","DOI":"10.2307\/356630","article-title":"The cognition of discovery: defining a rhetorical problem","volume":"31","year":"1980","journal-title":"College Composition and Communication"},{"issue":"2","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref022","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"127","DOI":"10.2501\/JAR-2017-020","article-title":"The downside of digital word of mouth and the pursuit of media quality: how social sharing is disrupting digital advertising models and metrics","volume":"57","year":"2017","journal-title":"Journal of Advertising Research"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref023","unstructured":"Gairola, S., Lal, Y.K., Kumar, V. and Khattar, D. (2017), \u201cA neural clickbait detection engine\u201d, available at: https:\/\/pdfs.semanticscholar.org\/96f9\/e55ff59ec574ce500a9c499124709db404da.pdf (accessed 1 May 2018)."},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref024","volume-title":"Organizational Ecology","year":"1993"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref025","volume-title":"Modern Rhetorical Criticism","year":"2015"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref026","volume-title":"Negative Binomial Regression","year":"2011"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref027","article-title":"Cross-website navigation behavior and purchase commitment: a pluralistic field research","year":"2012"},{"issue":"6380","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref028","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1094","DOI":"10.1126\/science.aao2998","article-title":"The science of fake news","volume":"359","year":"2018","journal-title":"Science"},{"issue":"1","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref029","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"75","DOI":"10.1037\/0033-2909.116.1.75","article-title":"The Psychology of curiosity: a review and reinterpretation","volume":"116","year":"1994","journal-title":"Psychological Bulletin"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref030","article-title":"Competition and the public interest in the digital market for information","year":"2017"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref031","first-page":"2967","article-title":"Hybridizing metric learning and case-based reasoning for adaptable clickbait detection","volume":"48","year":"2017","journal-title":"Applied Intelligence"},{"issue":"4","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref032","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"424","DOI":"10.1086\/209459","article-title":"Figures of rhetoric in advertising language","volume":"22","year":"1996","journal-title":"Journal of Consumer Research"},{"issue":"5","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref033","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1292","DOI":"10.1108\/IntR-03-2017-0118","article-title":"The dark side of news community forums: opinion manipulation trolls","volume":"28","year":"2018","journal-title":"Internet Research"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref034","article-title":"Aggregation, clickbait and their effect on perceptions of journalistic credibility and quality","year":"2019","journal-title":"Journalism Practice"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref035","first-page":"1261","article-title":"Use of clickbait in the online news media of the 28 EU member countries","volume":"72","year":"2017","journal-title":"Revista Latina de Comunicaci\u00f3n Social"},{"issue":"4","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref036","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1","DOI":"10.1080\/00913367.2002.10673681","article-title":"The development, change, and transformation of rhetorical style in magazine advertisements 1954\u20131999","volume":"31","year":"2002","journal-title":"Journal of Advertising"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref037","first-page":"810","article-title":"Clickbait detection","year":"2016"},{"issue":"3","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref038","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"386","DOI":"10.1108\/LHT-03-2017-0062","article-title":"Fake news: belief in post-truth","volume":"35","year":"2017","journal-title":"Library Hi Tech"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref039","article-title":"\u201cClickbait and impact: how academia has been hacked","volume-title":"Impact of Social Sciences Blog","year":"2017"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref040","first-page":"8216","article-title":"BaitBuster: a clickbait identification framework","year":"2017"},{"issue":"3","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref041","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"572","DOI":"10.1111\/j.1541-1338.1982.tb00463.x","article-title":"Gresham's Law: the regulatory analogy","volume":"1","year":"1982","journal-title":"The Review of Policy Research"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref042","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Rubin, V.L. (2017), \u201cDeception detection and rumor debunking for social media\u201d, in Sloan, L. and Quan-Haase, A. (Eds), The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods, pp. 342-364.","DOI":"10.4135\/9781473983847.n21"},{"issue":"35","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref043","first-page":"1","article-title":"A news verification browser for the detection of clickbait, satire, and falsified news","volume":"4","year":"2019","journal-title":"The Journal of Open Source Software"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref044","unstructured":"Scacco, J.M. and Muddiman, A. (2016), \u201cInvestigating the influence of \u201cclickbait\u201d news headlines\u201d, Engaging News Project Report, available at: https:\/\/mediaengagement.org\/research\/clickbait-headlines\/ (accessed 1 August 2016)."},{"issue":"3","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref045","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"246","DOI":"10.1590\/S1807-76922012000300002","article-title":"How consumers persuade each other: rhetorical strategies of interpersonal influence in online communities","volume":"9","year":"2012","journal-title":"BAR-Brazilian Administration Review"},{"issue":"7","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref046","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1113","DOI":"10.1287\/mnsc.1060.0624","article-title":"Interfirm collaboration networks: the impact of large-scale network structure on firm innovation","volume":"53","year":"2007","journal-title":"Management Science"},{"issue":"2","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref047","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"133","DOI":"10.1509\/jmkg.70.2.133","article-title":"Converting web site visitors into buyers: how web site investment increases consumer trusting beliefs and online purchase intentions","volume":"70","year":"2006","journal-title":"Journal of Marketing"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref048","first-page":"467","article-title":"Deep headline generation for clickbait detection","year":"2018"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref049","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"31","DOI":"10.28945\/4279","article-title":"Ensemble learning approach for clickbait detection using article headline features","volume":"22","year":"2019","journal-title":"Informing Science: The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline"},{"issue":"3","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref050","first-page":"154","article-title":"The myth of the rhetorical situation","volume":"6","year":"1973","journal-title":"Philosophy and Rhetoric"},{"issue":"2","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref051","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"372","DOI":"10.3844\/jcssp.2015.372.382","article-title":"A novel approach for user navigation pattern discovery and analysis for web usage mining","volume":"11","year":"2015","journal-title":"Journal of Computer Science"},{"issue":"4","key":"key2021120815040209900_ref052","first-page":"304","article-title":"Subscription to fee-based online services: what makes consumer pay for online content?","volume":"6","year":"2005","journal-title":"Journal of Electronic Commerce Research"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref053","first-page":"63","article-title":"The good, the bad and the bait: detecting and characterizing clickbait on YouTube","volume-title":"2018 IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops","year":"2018"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref054","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"125","DOI":"10.1016\/j.elerap.2018.04.004","article-title":"From buzz to bucks: the impact of social media opinions on the locus of innovation","volume":"30","year":"2018","journal-title":"Electronic Commerce Research and Applications"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref055","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Zheng, H.T., Yao, X., Jiang, Y., Xia, S.T. and Xiao, X. (2017), \u201cBoost clickbait detection based on user behavior analysis\u201d, in Web and Big Data. APWeb-WAIM 2017, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 10367, Springer, Cham, pp. 73-80.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-319-63564-4_6"},{"key":"key2021120815040209900_ref056","unstructured":"Zhou, Y. (2017), \u201cClickbait detection in tweets using self-attentive network\u201d, available at: https:\/\/arxiv.org\/pdf\/1710.05364.pdf (accessed 1 May 2018)."}],"container-title":["Internet Research"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.emerald.com\/insight\/content\/doi\/10.1108\/INTR-09-2019-0373\/full\/xml","content-type":"application\/xml","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"},{"URL":"https:\/\/www.emerald.com\/insight\/content\/doi\/10.1108\/INTR-09-2019-0373\/full\/html","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,7,24]],"date-time":"2025-07-24T21:36:49Z","timestamp":1753393009000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"http:\/\/www.emerald.com\/intr\/article\/30\/3\/1043-1058\/178671"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2020,3,13]]},"references-count":57,"journal-issue":{"issue":"3","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2020,3,13]]},"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2020,5,18]]}},"alternative-id":["10.1108\/INTR-09-2019-0373"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1108\/intr-09-2019-0373","relation":{},"ISSN":["1066-2243"],"issn-type":[{"value":"1066-2243","type":"print"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2020,3,13]]}}}