How clickbait grew up and got (sort of) serious

Scott DeLong famously founded his clickbait empire ViralNova from the spare bedroom of an Ohio house that backed up against a cornfield. ViralNova had to grow up or perish, like many of its contemporaries. The site, together with Upworthy and Distractify and untold hordes of clones, was part of an early wave of clickbait hawkers that exploited what media strategist Colin Nagy once called a “glitch in the matrix”: the fact that, for a short time, Facebook’s News Feed algorithm would reward anyone who found a junk story and put a tear-jerky headline on it.

But in the two years since DeLong started the site from his spare room, Facebook has changed enormously -- particularly in regards to how it treats clickbait. In December 2013, the site announced its News Feed algorithm would begin zeroing in on “high-quality content”. In August, Facebook began targeting clickbait mills more explicitly. Clickbait is converging on the Internet, more so than merely conquering it. Upworthy has insisted its writers fact-check and source every story. Buzzfeed, once frequently mentioned in the same breath as ViralNova, now operates nearly a dozen bureaus and publishes 5,000-word investigations on things like abuse in the foster system.