Clickbait always reels me in

I stumbled across an online headline last week that was so shocking that I couldn’t click on the story fast enough.

“The Phoenix Suns Will Trade Kevin Durant to the Oklahoma City Thunder,” the headline shouted.

What? Click.

Turns out it was only someone’s outlandish conjecturing with nothing to back it up. It wasn’t even a rumor.

In fact, the story led with an editor’s note that said “This article is a PREDICTION and not a REPORT.”

What it was, was “clickbait,” designed to pull in as many readers as possible because clicks equal eyeballs which equal advertising revenue.

I felt foolish for even clicking on the headline.

Still, I always click.

Clickbait seems to dominate the sports headlines you are likely to run across in a Google search or as a link found on your favorite social media platform.

For instance, I shared a headline I saw last week in a group text with my friends Steve Buck and Ed Godfrey that said “The Giannis to OKC discourse has started.”

Steve immediately responded, “Clickbait.”

Yeah, but I still clicked on it. Just call me gullible. I can’t NOT click when I see an intriguing-yet-preposterous headline.

Just a couple days ago I ran cross a headline that said Russell Westbrook sent the OKC Thunder a “message” after the Denver Nuggets sent the Thunder to their first defeat of the seas week.

I clicked on it, of course. Turns out, Russ didn’t exactly drop the Big One on the Thunder. Here’s the “message” Westbrook delivered during the course of a postgame interview:

“Right now they’ve got the best record but I feel like we’ve got a better team and tonight we showed that.”

Not exactly bulletin board material and not a pointed comment, really. But it captured my eyeballs with a click.

So we come to tonight. As I am writing this blog post, I came across yet another intriguing headline.

“A Bucks-Thunder trade sending Brook Lopez to OKC would benefit both sides” 

What? Click. I AM gullible.