I concur with this. Even if I’m really tired or not wanting to invest much time, I can read through a Cracked article quickly because of this format. I only have to read enough that I feel I understand what is being said, and then can move on. Without a list format, that usually will just lead me to getting lost, having missed something important.
Reason number 6:
The success of Cracked.com was built on numbered lists, and it’s an easily copiable format. (Just like Cosmo spawned a large number of imitators in paper magazines.)
Reason number 7:
It encourages people to click several times to see the next item or the rest of the list. This improves the statistics advertisers use to gauge reader interest (or so I read somewhere).
Seems to me it’s also easier to search for. If I’m looking for the best Half Life 2 mods, the first thing I’m going to click on is “10 best Half Life 2 mods.”
One of the major online news websites in Australia is copping quite a bit of flak from readers for basically becoming a combination of “Is this the [blank]iest [blank] of all time?” pieces, “Random thing/funny pic goes viral on the internet so now it’s a news story”, “Stuff from a US affiliate/partner with no Australian relevance whatsoever” and the “[number] of [something something something Dark Side]” articles the OP mentions.
As well as the reasons mentioned by others (The numerical list articles are cheap to write), they also generate a lot of reader feedback (“engagement”) - even if a not insignificant percentage of that “engagement” is people complaining something like “The 10 best ways animals have saved Christmas” is not something which belongs on a (ostensibly respectable) news website.
The local weekly had a lot of lists when it started because they’re easy to churn out and the extra paragraph breaks meant a bigger paycheck and less work to writers who were paid by the line.
These are often called “listicles”:
Today’s xkcd: I can only assume he was watching this thread.
A little history lesson. The “listicle” (although I’ve never heard that term before) was a product of the “service journalism” trend that started about 125 years ago. Magazines like Ladies Home Journal and *Better Homes and Gardens *were all about helpful ideas for self-improvement. A snappy “Ten best ways to have your servants beat your rugs” turned out be a lot more eye-catching on the front cover than “New techniques in rug beating” and the list format lives on.
You should have made your OP:
What are the Top 5 reasons numerical-list-based articles are so popular on the web?
I’ve got to assume that you’re making some kind of joke here.
I’ve looked at hundreds of magazines from that era and never once have I seen a line like that. Especially on the cover, since that type of magazine almost never listed stories on the cover. Some magazines put their table of contents onto the cover, but I have never once seen a listicle article title.
I did a Google image search for Ladies’ Home Journal cover 1900. No examples show up of what you’re referring to. In fact, the single most famous article of that era is right up there. What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years. It’s a list, but it’s also unnumbered and the title gives no hint that a list is contained in it.
If you intended history, you’re completely wrong. If you intended a joke, it fell flat.