Big Noises: Stuart Forrest on clickability vs clickbait

Host: Peter Houston
July 31, 2023

On this week’s episode of Media Voices – the final edition of our Big Noises series – we hear from Bauer’s Global SEO Director Stuart Forrest. As Peter makes clear in his intro, Stuart has worked at most of the major publishers in the UK in a variety of different roles, which has granted him a unique insight into the good and bad practices of the industry.

He tells us about all the changes he’s seen over his career to date, why the publisher-platform tug-of-war is inevitable but subject to change, and how ‘clickability’ differs from ‘clickbait’.

We’ll be back soon with our autumn season of Media Voices.

A key highlight from Stuart’s interview:

On ‘clickability’ versus ‘clickbait’…

“I was doing some training for our editors on Google Discover last week. The phrase we use is “it needs to be clickable, not clickbait”. The content must be engaging and entertaining, solve a problem, solve a need and be different. And it’s fine to make that headline clickable, but there’s a there’s a nuance difference between clickable because it’s interesting and clickbait because it’s promising something it doesn’t deliver on when you get there.

We probably were driven in that direction by that never-ending quest for reach, particularly when publishing businesses were dominated by digital advertising which felt like a race to the bottom on volume. But I think those days are going and more enlightened publishers are trying to produce quality content that is genuinely entertaining and different – partly because that’s what Google wants.”

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