The saying “If it bleeds, it leads” is often used among newspaper editors to explain the focus on bloody headlines, which tend to grab more attention from readers. This intuition has been investigated scientifically in several ways, such as by presenting test subjects with different messages and observing their reactions, or by analyzing how often positive and negative news is shared on social media.
While printing and measuring the success of different versions of a newspaper with either a negative or positive headline would be the most accurate way to test this theory, it is undoubtedly costly. Fortunately, the Internet offers new and cheaper ways to conduct research.
An international research team that involved the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Munich used datasets from Upworthy.com, an English-language news portal that experimented with different headline variations for its articles. They analyzed 370 million page impressions and 5.7 million clicks on over 23,000 articles with different keyword variations from January 2013 to April 2015.
The researchers classified keywords appearing in the articles, such as “love” or “bad,” according to the analysis software Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. They found that a single negative keyword significantly increased click rates from around 1.4 to 2.3 percent. Negative words like “wrong,” “bad,” or “awful” tended to attract readers more than “positive” words like “love,” “pretty,” and “beautiful.”
Furthermore, click-through rates tended to increase for longer headlines that contained more potentially negative vocabulary. Headlines that appealed to emotions also proved to be effective, as sadness tended to attract more clicks, while joy was less successful. The effect of negative vocabulary varied depending on the topic, with the strongest effects found in news from politics and business.
The study provided an ironic conclusion since Upworthy, the website used in the experiment, aimed to spread positive news. The team’s results could help news outlets understand how to write more effective headlines that attract readership, but they also raise questions about the impact of sensational, negative headlines on the public perception of news.
In March of 2023, an update was made to the study with an experiment in which four headline variants were played out. The result of the experiment contradicted the research team’s initial findings. While they found that negative headlines tend to attract more clicks, the top-performing headline in the experiment that ran four variations contained no negative words.
