You'll never believe the 11 reasons Clickhole is theInternet's most brilliant site

When Clickhole launched a year ago this month, it quickly became clear that the Onion sibling wasthe right site for the right moment. Designed to resemble the host of Facebook-feed-clogging trafficgenerators such as Upworthy, Distractify, Playbuzz, Viral Thread, and Shocktopia, Clickhole'smission is to make a mockery of online media's most gimmicky behavior (lists! quizzes! sales-pitchheadlines!) and overreliance on viral-ready subjects such as celebrity gossip, 90s pop-culturenostalgia, reactionary politics, and personal essays.

Clickhole is most commonly characterized as a Buzzfeed spoof ("a pitch-perfect Buzzfeed parody," asa recent Slate piece described it), but that's not quite the whole story. Clickhole's satire has abroader target: a society in which Internet browsing and social media command more attention fromhumans than the real world around us, and more businesses than ever are licking their chops toharness that attention for profit.

But what exactly is it about Clickhole's satire that's so resonant? In observance of the site's one-yearanniversary, I tried to get to the bottom of Clickhole, to consider why it isn't just good but also goodfor the Internet. Naturally, I formatted my findings as a list.

"Area Men Agree Print Is Dead" went the Crain's Chicago Business headline, in November 2013,above a story about how the Onion would cease its print operations that December to focus all itsattention on digital operations. Just as "America's Finest News Source" mimicked the editorial formsof newspapers, its business model, unfortunately, also replicated the downward trends of most print-

media outlets.

What the brain trust at the Onion realized is that in order to survive it could imitate the patterns ofthe most successful media companies--pursuing high online traffic numbers in order to secure sitesponsorships and higher digital ad rates--while simultaneously parodying those same mediacompanies that dumb down content to generate readership. Publishing this material in the Onion,which already had an identity as a takeoff of newspapers, wouldn't be the right fit. The obvioussolution was to create an entirely new website.

Clickhole's self-description--which went live on launch day, June 12, 2014--is a study incontemporary online-media jargon: "the latest and greatest online social experience filled with themost clickable, irresistibly shareable content anywhere on the Internet." There's even a visual guide--"A Step-By-Step Guide To Clicking"--with illustrations that resemble an airplane safety manual.

One of Clickhole's signature satirical tricks is to fool readers into thinking that the site has removedits conceptual veil. Take the "What is the goal of Clickhole?" section on the "About Us" page. "Let'sbe honest," it reads, "Today, the average website carelessly churns out hundreds of pieces ofpandering, misleading content, most of which tragically fall short of going viral. At ClickHole, werefuse to stand for this."

At the moment that it appears as if Clickhole is being sincere about its objective, the site's authorsfail to break character.

"We strive to make sure that all of our content panders to and misleads our readers just enough tomake it go viral," the passage continues. "You see, we don't think anything on the internet shouldever have to settle for mere tens of thousands of pageviews. We believe that each and every article--whether about pop culture, politics, internet trends, or social justice--should be clicked on andshared by hundreds of millions of internet users before they can even comprehend what they justread."

Clickhole often seems like a reaction to a feeling that anyone who spends hours a day online staringinto a screen can relate to: a restless ennui. In its most despair-filled

articles, the site's message is that virtual life is essentially unfulfilling.

This outlook is epitomized by the recent listicle "The Only 31 Things Standing in Between You andYour Dreams," a brutal rundown of the obstacles people face in contemporary capitalist society,from student loans to complacency to pet ownership to "the finite nature of time." The cheerfulphrasing of each ostensibly motivational item only makes the cruelty of the exercise that much moredevastating. Sample: "Achieving your dreams requires a lot of time and attention, so all you've got todo is part ways with the person you love more than anyone else on earth and you'll be completelyfree to dive into things headfirst."

As most famously popularized by Buzzfeed, online quizzes (at best) test trivia knowledge and(mostly) ascribe broad, dumb labels to people via answers to seemingly unrelated questions: "WhoShould You Date Based on Your Taste in Food?" "Can We Guess How Good You Are In Bed FromThese Random Questions?" "Which Type Of Salsa Are You?" (These are real Buzzfeed quizzes.)

The first quiz Clickhole published is still perhaps the site's best: "If I Ordered Fries, Would You Have

Any?" It offers stages of a dialogue between two people, with the reader acting as one side of theexchange. The possible responses to the question "I probably wouldn't eat them all, but would youhelp me if I ordered a small?" include: "I could maybe go for a few," "I don't know," and "I'm notsuper hungry, but are you definitely going to get some?"

In addition to pointing out the trivial nature of online quizzes, Clickhole suggests the Web gimmickis an extension of a broader malaise: that the self-absorbed, bourgeois interaction between twopeople over whether or not to order and split fries comes from the same impulse that leads people totake an Internet quiz.

Clickhole's Blog section frequently and masterfully satirizes online writing's most common, mostnauseating trends.

In response to the Internet's glut of personal essays about major life decisions reduced to smugadvice columns, Clickhole posted "How Changing Careers at 40 Taught Me What a Bad DecisionThat Was," a nod to the fact that essays about utter failure are almost never published online.

Tackling opinion pieces that excessively project political or social problems onto subjects, art, orculture, the site fired off "If Only Once, it Would Be Nice if Hodor Said 'Women's Rights,'" whichmocks gratuitous sociopolitical criticism of Game of Thrones by attributing a lack of feminist thoughtto a character who can only say his own name.

The site also has taken aim at outrage-filled op-eds. In "It's Time to Publicly Execute RonaldMcDonald," a "children's health and consumer advocate" argues ironically that the only way to stopthe negative influence the McDonald's mascot has on children would be to kill him in front ofchildren.

And then there are Yelp reviews: Clickhole's five-star "I Had a Terrible Experience at ThisRestaurant Because I Am a Terrible Person" speaks for itself.

Like any earnest media company, Clickhole uses Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to share its owncontent. But it also repurposes those same channels as a conduit for different styles of humor,refracting criticisms of social media through social media themselves. On its feeds, the site overlaysabsurd maxims and directives over various images. Emblazoned on a picture of a sun setting over amountain range, for instance, is this text: "Like if you agree that the sun is impossible!"

In Clickhole's view, "likes" and "shares" of politically inclined social media campaigns don't oftenhave much of a real-world effect on whatever cause they're promoting. Regardless of whether it's acorporation, a nonprofit, or a viral-content website behind the squishy campaign, the act is merely apromotional tool for the brand that has opportunistically latched on to the associated issue ormovement. Hence a photo of a Coke can with a message that reads, "It's time to make a difference!Share if you want Coca-Cola to print 'It's good that women can vote' on every can."

Aside from corporations using social tools to cash in, Clickhole also has social media's superstars inits sights. Back in September, it published "10 Things We Hope George Takei Likes Enough toShare," aimed at the former Star Trek cast member whose social media feeds are some of the mostpopular on the Internet (his Facebook page alone has more than 8.6 million followers). Clickhole'slisticle featured such Takei bait as a cute kitten photo, memes related to rock star astrophysicist NeilDeGrasse Tyson, and even Edvard Munch's The Scream with Takei's signature "Oh Myyy"catchphrase written in a word bubble on top of the painting. The site then ventured on a daylongmission to get Takei to share the list, tagging him on Twitter and Facebook and even making his

head take the place of the o in its logo.

Eventually Takei did share the Clickhole post on his Facebook page, and he definitely understood onsome level what the site was trying to do, writing, "To the gang over at clickhole.com: Okay, you gotmy attention, and it was really quite funny. Like an online 'roast' of sorts. Keep it coming." As of thiswriting, the Facebook post has received more than 38,000 likes and 1,300 shares.

In the recurring item "They Said What?!" Clickhole attributes fake quotes to real celebrities, a send-up of tabloid magazines and websites that conduct the same practice with actual quotes. What'sremarkable is that some celebs, thinking Clickhole to be yet another run-of-the-mill clickbaiter, haveactually believed the site was misquoting them. This isn't a new experience for the Onion; there arewhole articles--on Buzzfeed even!--that list the instances people were fooled by the fake newsorganization.

A "They Said What?!" in April had Russell Crowe weighing in "on cultural differences": "Whenever Ihear an American say Aussies drive on the 'wrong side of the road,' I just lose it. You ever thinkabout how those people grew up driving on the 'wrong side of the road,' watched a lot of people gethurt on the 'wrong side of the road,' die on the 'wrong side of the road,' while other people cheeredfrom the 'right side of the road'? Australia has a thing called Highway Fights, so it's touchy." WhenClickhole posted it on Twitter, Crowe, not realizing what the site is, tweeted in reply: "What is thisrubbish? Where does it come from?" He removed the tweet shortly afterward.

Last month, Anderson Cooper followed suit. Clickhole quoted the CNN news reader saying, at acommencement address at NYU: "Graduation is a big deal--bigger than getting a hole-in-one whilegolfing. People might think you're lying about the hole-in-one, but when you graduate, you get adiploma." Cooper tweeted at Clickhole: "Ummm... @Clickhole, do u make this stuff up? I never saidthis quote and never spoke to the NYU class of 2015." Unlike Crowe, Cooper was able to make lightof the situation later, admitting on his show that he didn't know what Clickhole was, laughinghysterically at its headlines, and telling viewers: "Don't believe everything you read."

Realizing that Moby-Dick is in the public domain, Clickhole reprinted the entirety of HermanMelville's novel--more than 200,000 words. The headline? "The Time I Spent on a CommercialWhaling Ship Totally Changed My Perspective on the World."

Clickhole's videos, particularly, often blur the distinctions between art, mass media, and satiricalcomedy. "This Stick of Butter Is Left Out at Room Temperature; You Won't Believe What HappensNext" is a willfully misleading title, because we all know exactly what happens next: the butterslowly melts, in real time, over the course of the three-hour video. But if you put the video on a

monitor in a contemporary art gallery, it wouldn't seem out of place.

In "What Does it Mean to Be a Man?" ambient music plays in the background while various menexplain the pressures of trying to appear manly. It's designed to resemble a public serviceinfomercial in which a series of subjects spill their personal accounts of a shared affliction. Just asthe notion that men are held to unfair standards is absurd, so are the comments the actors make inthe video. "The free turkey men get is good. The free Oreos are good," says one guy. "But mustardcosts four times as much for men, and that can be so hard sometimes." The video is more surrealthan most of what passes for "surrealism" nowadays, managing to critique inequality whileapproaching the subject in a bizarre, oblique, totally unpredictable manner.

Despite being a project devoted to satirizing the current state of online media, Clickhole's financialmodel nevertheless relies on the same principles as the most egregious clickbait violators: itproduces proven traffic generators such as quizzes, listicles, and videos (the site averages betweenten and 15 million page views a month); its staffers write commanding and wordy headlines; itpublishes "sponsored posts"; and the site's editors and writers tend to look to the same Google-search-friendly topics--celebrities, Game of Thrones, cats--as any of their

targets.

Clickhole even participates in a practice that annoys even the most obliging online mediaconsumers: it splits articles into separate pages to increase page views. Naturally, the site devised abrilliant concept to carry out the scheme: Clickventures, a play on Choose Your Own Adventure inwhich users click various buttons that lead them on alternate routes. At the end of the click-happyjourney, of course, Clickhole prompts visitors to go back to the beginning and try a different courseof action. Because: more clicks!

Less than six months after Clickhole's launch, one of its editors was poached by Buzzfeed, promptingsome bloggers to express mock concern that the Internet would collapse. But should anyone havebeen surprised?

By so closely resembling the sites it mocks, Clickhole rather stealthily has become the very samekind of site. It is just as reliant on page views as any other digital publisher, but by so craftilysatirizing the Internet industrial complex, it has managed to be above reproach.

After Clickhole had been operating for 100 days, Fast Company ran an interview with two of thesite's principals, editor Jermaine Affonso and Onion managing editor Ben Berkley. Despite being inthe business of writing jokes, Affonso and Berkley sound more like marketers than comics, theformer eager to note how an article is "a really strong piece of content," and both discussing therelative reach of different kinds of "content" they

produce.

The Onion's three-year-old ad agency, Onion Labs, joins Buzzfeed and Vice among the ranks ofcompanies that house editorial projects and advertising businesses under the same roof. "OnionLabs has produced articles and video content for around 150 brands, including Burger King, Honda,Bud Light and Lenovo, which flock to the company for its comedic expertise," Digiday's EricBlattberg wrote in April. "And when advertisers don't get the joke, they can work with the A.V. Club,the Onion's entertainment and pop culture publication."

For a company that derives so much of its success from taking aim at other publications' ravenous

pursuit of clicks (and therefore ad dollars), the Onion appears to be blurring the line betweenadvertising and editorial as much as any other online publication. If Clickhole offers the mostincisive critique of the decay of editorial integrity, then how do we make sense of the reality thatonline media's sharpest critic is also eager to embrace the current state of things? How far down theClickhole can we go? v

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