BuzzFeed and Upworthy are tough to parody, since they seem to cross the line into self-parody often enough, but news lampoon site The Onion is going to give it a shot anyway. The joke media giant is launching ClickHole this June according to the New York Business Journal , which promises “an all-new internet experience filled with content so shareable, snackable, and clickable it will rob you of all logic and reason.”
In practice, that means The Onion will be offering up content like a slideshow of different kinds of hay without captions, videos that hide actual intelligent content in delivery packages that resemble cute, viral clickbait, and quizzes with blatant (rather than hidden) sponsor intent. The only problem I can see is that rather than shame viral content sites, ClickHole might actually provide them a roadmap for future product development. We’re taking notes.
The new initiative was announced yesterday at the NewsFronts presentation in NYC, which is targeted at advertisers and media marketing professionals. And ClickHole.com currently hosts an infographic to jog your memory about how to give good traffic, in case you forgot or don’t yet know. At my current pace, I should hit the click counter target just in time for launch, which means I should be plenty ready to reward The Onion’s parodies of shameless attempts at traffic grubbing. Which are themselves also exactly that? INTERNET!
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