Now isn’t that a click bait article? In reality, this blog post has nothing particularly surprising about it. But I DO want to talk about click bait in relation to the current lawsuit against Webtoons.
RM Law Announces Class Action Lawsuit Against Webtoon Entertainment Inc.
https://www.morningstar.com/news/pr-newswire/20240925dc15828/rm-law-announces-class-action-lawsuit-against-webtoon-entertainment-inc
Now this is an interesting case because of how much it, pardon my language, Hecking Sucks For Realzies!
In my artist communities we have come to hate Webtoon for how it has monopolized the webcomic industry through predatory and hostile business practices (which would add about 1,000 words to explain so just Trust Me Bro, I Prommy I’m Right (a legal defense well known throughout the United States)). Webcomics used to be the primary avenue through which an independent artist could post their stories. Those who were online in the 00s consider webcomics to be its own form of media right beside books, tv shows, and video games.
Then Webtoon came along and except for the biggest bastion of independent artists (Dumbing of Age, Gunnerkrig Court, Girl Genius, etc (even CTRL+ALT+DEL shut down! That’s how much of a webcomic apocalypse it was!)) webcomics pretty much went the way of the ghost unless you were willing to sign up for increasingly unfair contracts with webtoons and their partners.
Well the thing about artists is that they are also the primary reader of such entertainment; so when a business starts jerking artists around, unlike in Hollywood or other such major media locales where the consumer is completely unaware of what goes on in the industry, the artists talk, and the predatory company suffers.
So what is the class-action lawsuit about?
It’s not about artists saying they were getting taken advantage of.
It’s not consumers saying that features they once had access to are now put behind paywalls.
It’s investors saying that the stock price plummeted.
Legally, webtoon did not break any laws. Everything they did to squeeze more pennies out of reader is not even “toeing the line” like some of the worst aggressors (Coca Cola cough) tend to get away with– they legitimately just didn’t do anything illegal. So why is there a lawsuit?
Because they did badly.
That’s it! That’s all that happened! They “wasted” investor dollars, and that’s literally illegal. Failing in business is literally illegal, no matter how good you were doing up until that point, or how aggressively you stuck to certain moral codes of conduct, or even no matter how mistaken the investor themselves are if they panic buy or panic sell. Webtoons is at fault because they…. did bad 🙁
What does this have to do with clickbait? Well, it’s not such a direct connection but they all exist in the same environment– oh wait hold on I forgot that these blogs have to include references to what we were learning that particular week via guest speakers and such. Let me go look at those videos again.
Okay it’s two days later and also I just finished Silent Hill 2 (remake), and it has made me want to write my novel but since I have assignments to write my inspiration comes to here instead. Also I double checked the video on Nitin Goyal and the thought I was having was correct but not quite as clear cut as I thought.
Data analysis is probably a job being most taken over by AI than nearly any other, eh? AI art looks like crap and artists chat a lot so companies are moving away from the bad press, but data analysis is long slog work that sucks and is definitely worth using AI for.
But anyways, in regards to “click bait” and data analysis and– hell even getting the data. You know I think actually that is the big deal here. Data analysis always comes with the simple caveat that you have to get the data in the first place. When it comes down to analytics, who’s watching, when, where, you can’t possibly pick up the WHY. At least, not from any meaningful work with quantitative data. Situation analysis and open listening can help you pick up what an audience is in general thinking, but it’s just not possible without a survey and open communication.
Even fostering the environment where a user is encouraged to openly communicate is nearly impossible– people are inclined to rebel against disingenuous work. To return to the original thought: Nowhere is that more prevalent than with click bait.
Your headline in news media is the first communication with the audience. Journalism organizations are dying. They need more views, more money. How do they get people to view? Well… click bait, for a time.
But that only works once. If you go into a video that promised you something exceptional and you get zip and zero? Out comes the rebellion against the disingenuous. How do you get data about that?
“Bad press is good press!” Is a classic saying that remains true, to a degree. If your goal is ONLY money, then why not do what Webtoon did? Why not squeeze every single penny you can out of your audience no matter what? Views = ad revenue = money = success! Yippee!
Well, no. Not on a wider scale at least. Every time you do it you’re going to get diminishing returns. People will start to dislike you more, people will stop viewing, people will stop caring. That is the death spiral that everywhere– god, really just everywhere on the net– is in right now.
The process is simple:
Do well at your job.
Investors come in.
Investors want more, because if you don’t do better and better exponentially every time you will LITERALLY GET SUED.
You start cutting back on features for users.
Users don’t want to stick around anymore.
Now you’re not making money.
Investors get Angy(tm)
You have to make more money somehow.
You squeeze and squeeze and squeeze.
Users get angry.
Users leave.
No users left.
You become X (formerly Twitter).
And it all begins at that headline (or, well, I could write 1,000 more words on the culture of open communication that the western world hates very very much and how the only way for click bait to go away and journalism is to survive would be for people to get over the Protestant ideals that were written into the constitution and– *I am strangled to death by the Spirit of Succinct Writing*)