Ten Reasons that You’re Going to Click on this Link

Isn’t that an infuriating headline? But you clicked on it. Isn’t it an awful world?

 

1. You’re a curious person. That’s maybe the one good thing you can take from this experience. There was a gap in your knowledge and you wanted to fill it. This is a good thing, it’s just a pity that it wasn’t something that would be actually beneficial to your brain.

 

2. Lists. Who doesn’t love a list? They’re organised, they’re succinct, they’re easy to understand and they lay it all out for you, right there, in front of your face, with bullet points.

 

3. The number ten is lovely. The metric system, decimal system, both based on ten being all easy and predictable. You know what you’re getting with the number ten. Counting in tens is like counting in ones, just add some zeroes on the end.

 

4. Once your curiosity is piqued it’s very hard to ignore it, you want to know, maybe you even need to know. If you think this point is very similar to point number one, that’s because –

 

5. Ten is going to be a very hard number to reach. This is the part in the list where stuff starts getting made up just so the number isn’t four. “Four reasons why the aliens will get us eventually”. Four? Nobody is going to click on that. You can make up four points about that quicker than it take the page to load. Ten, with modern internet loading times, is too many. Might as well click the link, it will be quicker.

 

6. Also, there might be a picture of a pretty lady in the article, the pretty lady will help to explain one of the more difficult points. The pretty lady is wonderful. Thanks for all the help, pretty lady.

7. The headline itself was designed, to be aimed, personally, at you. YOU. It even says the words ‘You’re going to click on this link’. That’s some Derren Brown shit.

 

8. Maybe you have literally nothing better to be doing. Perhaps you’re not procrastinating. Maybe you’re trying to fill your day and this is the best way you know how. However, it is a terrible way, you should either read this, which is much better, or go outside. Maybe you could buy an ice cream or a fishing rod and dip either one of them into a pond.

 

9. How the hell do you get to ten? I’ve seen these lists go up into the 60s. Look, basically you clicked on that link to this nonsense article because the elephant that lives in the tree only eats Jaffa Cakes and you find that to be a very endearing quality in a tree-domesticated elephant.

 

10. You clicked on it because it’s click-bait. It’s a way of tricking you to click a thing by the way the title was written. You knew it was click-bait, you knew there’d be nothing substantial in this article, but you clicked it for the same reason that you would go to see a fourth Transformers film. So you could guiltlessly stuff your procrastinating face with popcorn. At the end of the day, I hope you’re happy. Or not happy. But I hope 100,000 people click on that link. (We live in hope).

 

I apologise if anyone got fired while reading this.