The Paper You Should NEVER Carry in Your Wallet! Ep. 5.239

hello welcome once again Plato's well I'm Steve Plato is there a single piece of paper you should never have in your wallet according to world's top attorneys no sorry the ad is clickbait I admit that the titles clickbait and I'm talking about clickbait today so you know if you don't want to talk about clickbait in that sense go click someplace else and I apologize now but we've all seen that at the bottom of legitimate news sites there'll be a bunch of ads for things that you're looking at going to can't be true and it'll say things like leading doctor says this one vegetable can kill you these actresses used to be dudes you know show a picture of an actress anyway yeah I thought that was a girl and you know ya know that is clickbait yeah no that is clickbait but the funny thing is is that once in awhile you'll see something you go i know its clickbait but i'm curious is there any truth to that and next thing you know you click on of course you're the sucker because that's all they want you to do all they want you to do is to click on it but here's something that's beyond this and I will credit Caitlin Tiffany at Vox for doing the hard work on this because she became as perplexed by this as everyone has been but she did some work on it and I'm telling you last week I was talking about brother about this and we were joking about there was I forgot which one it was a he clicked on and he said every time I clicked I'd go to another page and it seemed to be taking me further and further away from what I clicked on but it never addressed what I was being click baited with and they've now discovered that they can simply adjust a headline on on a box until they get a good click-through rate and they will never actually answer the question because there's no way for you to complain about it because once you've clicked that's all the transaction that they need from you and so it's a very very strange thing to happen you know in a world where we're so used to the idea that consumers they have some say by controlling where they spend their money but here when you click on the end you're spending somebody else's and somebody else is making money off that and so the weird thing is that Caitlin Tiffany at Vox decided to track down the one that says throw this vegetable out now this doctor begs of you and you've seen this one there is a gut doctor any Beggs Americans throw out this vegetable now and this news is accompanied by a different image nearly every time sometimes I'll show a vegetable sometimes they'll actually show a photo artist rendering of your gut I'm surprised they don't show gravestones it goes to her this morning the plea appeared at the bottom of an article on box next to a photo of a hand chopping up what appears to be a pile of green apples which aren't vegetables of course and other times it's been paired with a picture of a petri dish with a worm in it again not a vegetable other times gut bacteria giving off electricity the inside of a lotus root and Illustrated rendering of roundworms the gut doctors desperate plea pops up over and over again our web sites like CNN the Atlantic Vox and they are often down at the bottom what they call chum boxes and I'd never heard that phrase before but apparently it's a term of art which is the worst of the worst of the clickbait is a chum box these are boxes at the bottom of the page several pieces of clickbait be sponsored content or suggested reading and these are generated by a few main companies once called tabula and once called out brain and both were founded in Israel about 10-15 years ago Chum box is a sort of a gross phishing reference Chum being the tiny fish fishers use as bait to catch larger fish before the word came into the lexicon Casey Newton explained the purpose of these boxes for The Verge in 2014 and wrote out brain tabula and their peers have a simple pitch for the site's they work with add our modules to your site for free with just a few lines of code and start making money immediately from the traffic you deliver to paying partners our whole pitch to publishers is a no-brainer Adam sing Golda co-founder and CEO of tabula as top journalistic outlets are making more than ten million dollars a year adding its modules to the site's which is significant revenues in an industry still struggling to find its footing online and so that's why these things are everywhere they're making money and as I'm sure you've heard as they just said traditional media old-school media print media and and some of these different outlets have tried to shift online don't know how to turn that into money until the Chum box is up here the gut doctors plea however keeps popping up over and over again so in 2015 John Mahoney coined the term and wrote a widely cited taxonomy of Chum box content and he and he says these things all fall into categories it can be a sexy thing like hot singles in your area localized rules such as your local parking laws have changed do you know this and they'll often insert the name of a location near you because they can pull that off your ISP a deeply psychological body thing a celeb thing an old person's face for some odd reason often works a skin thing you know what it means if you've got this spot on your body a miracle cure thing of course a weird tattoo is something that somehow draws in a lot of clicks imply to bodily openings they want to show a picture of what you think it is but your first brain is your first brain thought is is that what I think oh no it's not but they got your attention and so he thinks that it might help click disgusting invertebrates or globular masses somehow we have an aversion or a repulsion from those things and and that causes you to have a reaction they just want you to have a reaction and they hope that once you react you will click all they want is that click an extreme weight loss thing hey doctor says this one vegetable will cause you to lose weight fat so fast that's dangerous a money thing of course for some odd reason and oozing food now the gut doctor fits into several of these categories depending on the image he that he's paired with he's always a miracle cure thing and he's often a disgusting invertebrates thing he is sometimes a deeply psychological body thing or losing food but it's always the gut doctor and by 2016 forty-one of the top 50 news sites used these modules for revenue Alex Goldman visited two Beulah's New York offices in June 2018 ory met CEO and founder Adam single des and single des informed him that he'd never heard the term chum box what I hadn't either in fact up till now if somebody told me they've been punched in the Chum box I would assume it hurt but I wouldn't know what they meant he said that he didn't even like calling them ads to him they are recommendations earlier this month content strategist Ranjan Roy published a more technical analysis of these links he identified five types of Chum box links based on the strategy they use to generate money such as search links where it says like new research about early symptoms of hepatitis C implying that there's something new which there never is affiliate marketing these are ads that use your IP address the target location specific ads then redirect you to weird insurance quote aggregators or car resellers slide show links these are ads that redirect you to a slide show about celebrities or some such thing and they refresh every time you click and once you click you get a whole bunch of new slides and the slide show if it's 32 pages long 9 ads per page you have clicked through 288 ads by the time you get the end of the slide show a real ad imagine that you're in the clutter of the Chum box and there's a real ad oh my gosh you know imagine your happiness for seeing a real ad some ads are actually real but they're often for things like junky objects such as a revolutionary tiny hearing aid and then the gut doctor falls in the fifth category which is a hidden content which is an ad that redirects you someplace unexpected unrelated to what you just clicked on and here is what this wrote from box Kaitlyn Tiffany where she points out that if you actually foolishly click on the gut doctor link you will never ever find out what the vegetable is that they're saying it could kill you it says the vegetable could kill you and it says if you click here it implies that you'll find out what the vegetable is but you will click and you'll go down a rabbit hole that takes you further and further away from what you clicked on but you have no recourse other than to stop clicking and if you keep clicking they just keep making money off you clicking on a Chum link from a chum box is a guaranteed way to find more weirder grocer Chum the boxes are daisy chained together in an increasingly cynical gross funnel quickly the ocean becomes a sewer of chum so then the question is and again this is one of those things is driving her crazy so Kaitlyn Tiffany just kept digging who is the gut doctor and what vegetable is he begging Americans to throw out I mean they raised the question and they never answered it so she decided okay screw it I'm gonna figure this out so she said if you go online you can find people who are asking the question it's a common meme on Twitter Fox Sports Radio host Jason Smith asks on Twitter what's the vegetable the top US gut doctors begging the Americans to throw out so the gut doctor at this point is in fact a meme and the question is could we get to the bottom of this or is it even based on anything that's possibly riedle the gut doctor to the author of this article is elusive she says she's refreshed every website she has seen it on dozens of times and regardless she's never seen a name she's never seen a vegetable like the answer is never there apparently and I'll cut to the chase on this one for you apparently they've simply discovered that's the most effective question you can put in the internet that people go and click on it it's a doctor telling you there's a simple vegetable that you need to throw out right now never eat again if that was true I guess I'd want to know so then she started poking around poking around poker finally she located a doctor who's somehow tied in with this whose name is dr. Vincent paid ray whose bio describes him as a certified medical doctor he apparently went and you know got real degrees and so on went to the University of Miami for medical school then he founded pay Drake integrative health where he takes he largely holistic approach to medicine and he's got a company called United naturals and there's some websites and so she started doing research on this guy because somehow he appeared to be linked to this and yet despite that she went through everything that he's posted all those newsletters she apparently signed up for some of them just to see if maybe the people who paid for the newsletters found out more and she got the very very bottom of all of this and she couldn't find any vegetables that he actually said would you know need to be removed from your kitchen otherwise they might kill you and she said that she came to the conclusion that it's possible he's referring to corn GMO corn but she's not even sure the mystery vegetables corn she puts a question mark doctor paid Ray's publicist stopped responding to my emails because apparently she was you know trying to email the guy after I stated my specific question is it corn eventually another person in one of the groups that she contacted buckled down to watch the entire video that was put out by dr. Pedro and apparently somebody else actually bothered to read the man's book happy gut the cleansing program to help you lose weight to gain energy and eliminate pain and and so somebody wrote so given this do you still eat corn I like it in small quantities the Mexican food but I stopped eating corn about 20 years ago but the point is that to even find that out she had to click and click and click and click and click and click and none of the things that she clicked on ever even said by the way here's the question that you were looking for an answer to and here's the answer they never did that the only reason she figured out that there was somebody who may have said something like this was that several of the things that were products being pitched by these Chum box ads were things linked to this doctor it's possible he's got nothing to do with it it's possible that he simply said I want to place ads and the Chum box people said well here's what we think would be the most responsive thing that we can put up and so is there a vegetable that could kill you well I assume we'd know about it by now we've been eatin vegetables for a few years now and I think as humans we would tend to notice if vegetables that we ate actually killed us I would I think I would notice if a vegetable killed me and if it killed someone near me I think I'd noticed that too but again when you see the headlines as doctor says you've got a tuna and okay could be an internet doctor remember or a doctor who doesn't do the doctrine you think member dr. Laura dr. Phil but [Laughter] then when they say yes but this vegetable you might have it in your house is gonna kill you you're gonna at least ask right what is it you know and and of course by asking a doctor you'd get an answer either yes or no or I don't know what are you talking about but if answering the question involves clicking on a Chum box ad that takes you to another Chum box add to another and you realize oh I shouldn't have done that I've now I've now climbed into the rabbit hole I need to get out of here as fast as I can so I found that article fascinating I'll put a link to it below and I've you know I've been accused of putting clickbait in my headlines I do try to make my headlines truthful and actually apply but I can tell you right now and I did articles for both road and track and Jalopnik a lot of times I would suggest I headline to them and an editor would often come back with a better headline and there were times when I look at it and go well you know my headline wasn't bad it's just that their headline I know is gonna get more clicks and the question of course is the headlines still honest and and and you know I think that those guys at both Jalopnik and Road and drink that come did a good job of that but you know like I said I wasn't even necessary one right in those but there are people out there who've got a skill for it and and believe it or not if you have a skill for writing those kinds of ads that work or those kinds of headlines that work you can get a job doing it and I read an article not too long ago and I apologize cuz I don't know if I could I'm sure I can find it actually was a woman who put together listicles the little stupid lists that they put on like BuzzFeed or whatever and some of them were like which Smurfs are you if you were a breakfast cereal which breakfast cereal would you be and when I when I see those headlines my my first reaction is man is that stupid that is that is really really bringing something useless to the Internet that really is and then I read how many hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of clicks she would get on a headline that said which Smurf are you and I realized wait it's so stupid but it's genius it's genius and it turns out that this one particular woman had a skill for that she had a skill for coming up with idiotic headlines and idiotic questions that a surprisingly large number of people on the internet enjoyed clicking on and going huh if I was a breakfast cereal I guess I'd be crisp it's old school and trust me my friends so anyways sorry about the clickbait dad but that's the story with the Chum box hope you enjoyed it questions you can was put humble others talk to later by you

Channel: Steve Lehto

Views: 340,272

Keywords: lemon law, lemon law attorney, lemon law lawyer, michigan lemon law, http://www.lehtoslaw.com

Id: fAebCoWnn8g

Length: 17min 38sec (1058 seconds)

Published: Sat May 11 2019