In order to fight against the cover party, netizens began to crowdfund the title and cover

Have you ever had this experience: you were quite interested in the cover and title, but after watching the video, you felt that it did not meet your expectations, and the content presented was also very different from what you imagined. This is the title party and the cover party. Isn't it disgusting? Let's follow the article to see what netizens do to fight against the cover party.

Everyone is familiar with the catchphrase. Some time ago, Zhihu pushed an article called "The Causes and Consequences of Li Yugang's Suicide by Jumping into the River" . Oh my, which good person came up with this title? A lot of people on the Internet thought that Li Yugang had jumped into the river, and the related topic quickly became a hot search, and he also quickly refuted the rumor.

Let’s look at this title again: “Just announced, big news for Jack Ma!” It is followed by “He has decided to run for President of the United States!” Although everyone knows that these two things are being talked about, how could anyone not be confused for 0.925 seconds?

Although everyone has seen this kind of headlines many times, every time you are deceived, you can only curse in your heart. It's like when you go to a public toilet and find a pile of shit when you push the door. You can't do anything except calling the idiot. You will encounter the same thing in the future.

However, what is even more distressing is that in today’s video age, more and more video covers are beginning to have the flavor of the clickbait headlines of the past.

I don’t know if you have had this experience before. I was quite interested in the cover, but after watching the video, I found that it did not meet my expectations, and the content presented was not what I thought at the beginning. Many covers have nothing to do with the content at all.

In fact, this phenomenon is not limited to any country, and it is the same for both domestic and foreign video websites. YouTube bloggers all know that when making video covers, there is a very common routine called "clickbait", which, as the name suggests , is to lure people in. The most typical one is to add exaggerated expressions on the cover.

If you look at those covers with real people, they often have their mouths and eyes wide open, and their expressions are either shocked, angry, or disgusted.

A blogger did a test and found that this "shocked face" can indeed increase the click-through rate of the video. He made two sets of covers for one of his videos, the difference was the expression. At first, it was an expression that was more in line with the content of the video - a thinking face, and then it was changed to a shocked face.

Backend data shows that the number of clicks on the shocked face is indeed a little higher.

Although He has done similar experiments before, he found that the more exaggerated, the more attractive.

But I think the shocked face is definitely effective in big data. Someone collected 600 videos that were trending on YouTube in a month, and then screened out 100 top videos that were trending twice. Then he extracted all the video covers and used a set of tools to bring those with similar features together. In this way, the more covers that are clustered in a certain area, the more covers have this feature.

The results show that the most common feature on the covers of these popular YouTube videos is: shocked face.

Since exaggerated expressions can be recognized by many big Vs, it must mean that they perform best in terms of data. It makes sense if you think about it. The shocked face can quickly resonate with the audience and strongly attract them to click into the video. In fact, there is nothing wrong with making a shocked face. Who doesn't want their carefully crafted content to have a dismal number of views because of a bad cover? But at least, you have to respect the actual content.

But the fact is that, under the temptation of profit, many bloggers, in pursuit of the highest possible number of clicks, gradually deviate from the real content of the video in the process of constantly "optimizing" the cover.

Of course, the shocked face is just one of the means to induce clicks. Elements that do not fit the content of the video will be inserted into the cover as long as they can induce clicks.

So the cover party was formed, and clickbait gradually became a synonym for "cover party". Look at the video below, the title is "We found an alien monolith in the Utah desert". There are flying saucers and aliens on the cover, and the blogger is also looking at a diamond-shaped object with green light with his eyes wide open and his mouth open.

Before Shichao clicked on it, he was quite curious about what this advanced alien thing looked like and whether he would be hurt if he got close to it. But when I saw this huge monument, I thought, is this really mocking my intelligence? If it really flew from outer space, it should at least look a bit high-tech. Not to mention that the material needs more polishing, look at the rivets, are they the same as the ones used on the bus stop sign at the entrance of our village?

If this monument is really alien technology, the United States would have sent military to guard it long ago. The creators must have watched too many movies like "2001: A Space Odyssey".

You say that this big blogger with millions of followers was so close, how could he not know that this was a prank? But for the sake of traffic, he still put a flying saucer and aliens on the cover, pretending to be shocked when necessary. Let's take a look at this video, the title is: You won't believe what I opened in this mysterious box.

I watched the video, and the whole process was just opening a blind box. Should I be so shocked?

You can imagine a Hearthstone streamer opening a box and getting a few orange cards. He then makes a surprised expression and says, "You won't believe what I got this time." Different types of videos have different ways of trying to get clicks, but they all have one characteristic: exaggeration. This YouTube video, called "The 14 Craziest Animal Fights Caught on Film," has 24 million views.

The cover looked bloody and violent, with a thick python entangled with an elephant. Although he was a little scared, Shi Chao clicked on it out of curiosity.

As a result, you told me that this was the craziest animal fight? One moment it was a fight between a hare and a snake, and the next moment a giraffe kicked a lion twice, and it looked like it was accidentally stepped on while running away. The most intense one was probably when these lions wanted to kill a buffalo, and then the buffalo's friends came to help. In the end, the buffalo successfully drove away the lions, and all the animals lived in peace...

Brother, is this what you mean by "craziest"? You like to play with contrast, right? This scale is not as good as the "Animal World" I watched on TV when I was a child. What about the python and elephant on the cover? As for these cover parties on YouTube, they are not uncommon on domestic video websites. I won't give examples, because everyone has seen them all the time.

But now, there may be a turning point. A developer has developed a plug-in called DeArrow, which is specifically designed to deal with these cover parties.

As long as you turn on the plug-in, when you browse YouTube, the video covers and titles will be replaced with those voted by netizens. In this way, what you see are the most authentic titles and covers verified by netizens. For example, the homepage of Mr. Beast, a top YouTuber, originally looked like this.

Open the plug-in and this is the homepage!

See? There are no shocked faces, no exaggerated elements, and what you see are all real video screenshots. And these screenshots are all video screens submitted by netizens and selected through voting (if no one submits, the plug-in will randomly display a certain second of the screen). In short, no matter how exaggerated and fancy your cover is, I'm sorry, I only see the most real video screenshots. Similarly, the title can also be crowdsourced. I think you are suspected of being a title party, so I can submit a title that I think is real.

Mr. Beast had a video titled "1,000 blind people saw the world for the first time", but netizens replaced it with "Help cure 1,000 blind people", removing the eye-catching keyword "first time". There is also a video called "1,000 deaf-mute people heard sounds for the first time", but the actual situation is that they helped them "re-hear" the sounds. Therefore, netizens replaced the title with "Help 1,000 people hear sounds again". Is this a successful crackdown on clickbait?

Anyway, after experiencing it, Shichao just hopes that all video platforms can introduce this feature so that those cover fans will stop wasting everyone's time. The cover and title of the video were originally for the audience. It should accurately tell everyone the main content and focus of the video. But since when, more and more video covers have begun to change, and exaggerated and unrealistic content has become a necessity on them, and eventually it has become a tool used purely to "pursue traffic and profits."

Of course, this method is not a long-term solution. After being deceived, the audience will immediately quit, and the fans will gradually become disappointed, and unfollowing and reporting will follow one after another.

The cover party and the title party, in the end, only deceive themselves. Two days ago, B station also announced that it would change the number of views displayed on the front page of the video to the length of time. The actual time users spend watching the video is a more valuable reference data.

So, for those low-quality videos that only know how to attract users to click through exaggerated titles and misleading covers.

I want to say, their good days are coming to an end, right?

Author: Shichao

Source: WeChat public account "Bad Reviews"