Addiction is one of the biggest drivers of behavior. If you can get someone addicted, you’ve set them off on a pattern that they’ll likely keep alive for months or years. Just look at gambling – many gamblers have done it for years and don’t intend to stop, even when they put themselves in financial jeopardy. When done right, the “hook model” is a method of creating an addictive pattern.
The hook model focuses on “triggers” that lead to recurrent and frequent actions that earn the customer a variable reward (it must vary or else it will be boring and won’t motivate long-term use), and these things earn you, the company, an “investment“, which is some action on the part of the customer that benefits you. Trigger, then action, then variable reward, then investment. At first, the trigger is external – this is how the customer first finds out about the product. Eventually, the trigger may become internal – the customer is bored, for example, and so they perform the action you want in order to stave off the boredom. Thus, you don’t need to put any additional effort into keeping engagement after the initial hook, because the customer craves that variable reward and will seek it out on their own.
And that’s only half as cynical as the usual tactics in marketing. And note that at no point does any of this occur to the customer’s conscious mind. It all takes place on an unconscious level. The customer, of course, thinks they’re taking this action purely because they want to, when in fact, the company designed it to be addicting and habit-forming in the first place. This is how social media apps are so successful. They start with a trigger – the initial trigger is your friend telling you to use the app (social media users are excellent free advertising); after that, perhaps you’re bored, maybe commuting to work, and you want something quick and simple to occupy you. Then comes the action, which is opening the app and scrolling through posts. Your variable reward for doing this is the content you see. It’s always different (many apps try to ensure you see different content every time you open them), hence variable. Your investment may be creating an account on the app or engaging with the app, maybe writing a post of your own. You provide the content so there’s no need for the company to do a thing! (In the process, the company makes ad revenue.)
Do you see why so many people are addicted to social media? Social media apps are deliberately designed to form habits. They can also use an additional trigger in the form of notifications that tell you about updates from people you follow. These apps are a perfect execution of the hook model. Not to give them too much credit, of course, because the hook model is incredibly cynical and manipulative.
Whenever you encounter a service or product, you should ask yourself: How does this product’s marketing team expect me to engage with it? When you see an ad, ask yourself: How is this ad trying to influence me to engage with the product it’s selling, or to form an opinion about the product? As long as you stay alert, they will find it very difficult to influence you.
CTR
Most content on the internet is about CTR: click-through rate. It’s the ratio of how many people see a link to your content to how many people actually click it. Content designed to maximize CTR is called clickbait. The title, for example, does not describe anything useful about the content itself; instead, it’s designed to manipulate people by arousing their curiosity. A clickbait title deliberately omits details rather than including them – so you have to click on it to find out.
Plainly, all that a lot of content creators care about is getting eyes on them – on their YouTube video or their blog. Written content is often presented in a “listicle” format (an article prominently featuring a list, each item of which is procedurally elaborated on). YouTube videos are often designed more for entertainment than to be informative – even the informative ones! If you want to get any large audience, you have to entertain them, like a certain YouTuber, whom we’ll call “Sam Bret” for no particular reason.
Sam Bret said, “A perfect idea [for video content] is an idea that’s clickable, but also highly, highly entertaining throughout the entire video.” So, you must entice the user into clicking on your content, but also you must never stop being “entertaining”. Although Sam Bret’s trash is extremely bad taste content, he is highly successful, partly because he utilizes techniques to improve CTR. On YouTube, CTR isn’t the only metric – whether or not people stick around is important too. YouTube tracks every second of every video you watch, and it gets fed into the Algorithm that decides which content to show.
On YouTube, you’re not making content for people – you’re making content for the Algorithm. Although the Algorithm is designed to present people with content they want to watch, it’s still pretty terrible at its job. And content created specifically to appeal to an algorithm rather than people is objectively inferior to content created for people.
YouTube, like many other social media sites, made a mistake – they got too big. When you have one gigantic space, there’s only so much attention to go around. On most sites, algorithms don’t spread its promotion even remotely evenly – the distribution is much like that of money in the real world: a few people hog most of it, which leaves everyone else fighting for scraps. This leads to even more inferior content designed for the Algorithm, which degrades the quality of the service overall. Sites like YouTube and TikTok are absolute hellholes because no one creates their content for people. It’s all designed to appeal to the machine learning system that is the arbiter of what gets seen on the platform. If the Algorithm wants you buried, you’re done for. No one’s going to see your stuff. So, at any cost, you must appeal to the Algorithm first and foremost, and even then, your chances are slim. Appealing to people comes second!
It’s similar with written content – you must appeal to the search engines first, your readers second, because without the search engines’ approval, you won’t even have readers in the first place!
The Ad Problem
In December 2022, the FBI issued a statement encouraging people to use ad blockers online due to cyber criminals using ad spaces in search engine results to post phishing or fake sites impersonating real ones. This, combined with the low visibility of ad indicators in many places, including Google (ads these days blend in much more with search results than they used to, to trick you into clicking them) and with search engines’ (especially Google’s) overly permissive attitude to ads, has resulted in many people clicking on fake ads, thinking they represented the true website.
Of course, the real, overarching problem here aside from cyber criminals is companies like Google doing anything to increase their ad revenue, no matter the consequences. The more ads they accept, the more diversified the ads they can show, and thus, the more likely it is that people will click on them. The more power they give to advertisers, the more advertisers will want to use their ad platform.
Almost every problem in the world, if you trace it back to its origins, will lead you to billionaires.