The typical clickbait headline might not be the stuff of Woodward and Bernstein, but it is surely familiar to almost all of us — news outlets are full of stories like that for the simple reason that they do well on Google and other search engines, and thus generate traffic.
Reach — one of the UK’s biggest newspaper publishers, behind the Mirror, Express and hundreds of local titles — relies on such articles for its revenue, thanks to the digital adverts served alongside the regurgitated content. So determined is Reach to increase these traffic numbers that it is setting individual traffic targets for all of its journalists: a minimum number of page views they must achieve, with requirements on those underperforming to do more to increase their numbers or face unspecified repercussions.
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