Clickbait
Etymology
A compound of "click" and "bait," it emerged in the late 1990s and became ubiquitous by the 2010s. The fishing metaphor casts the reader as a fish and the headline as a lure. It marked the moment when the click itself, not the reading, became the unit of value online.
noun · /KLIK-bayt/
Content whose headline or thumbnail is engineered to be irresistibly clickable, usually at the expense of what actually delivers.
What it names
The gap between the promise that earns the click and the payoff that follows, a gap opened by paying creators for attention rather than for substance.
Example
"You won’t believe what happened next" is clickbait so pure it barely pretends otherwise.
Related idea
Ragebait is a specialized descendant of clickbait that lures with anger rather than curiosity or promise.