From the Wall Street Journal: You Won’t Believe What Word This Column Is About!

“Clickbait” came together as a compound as early as 1999. That year, Network Magazine reported on a “‘clickbait’ Web page” that exhorted, “Click here to become a millionaire in five minutes.” Clicking on that link caused some hacker’s malicious code to be downloaded.

Nowadays, “clickbait” by and large merely induces the casual reader to click through to some inane Web feature that can never measure up to its hyperbolic headline. [continue]

Yeah, that’s a good summary. Do you read websites that feature clickbaity headlines? I try to avoid them.