From time to time I’ll see an article with some title like “Girl-Next-Door Model Tahlia Skines Stuns In Sexy Bikini In Racy Instagram Post.” Oft they’ll be from semi-legitimate news sources, like People or whatever.
Who is the intended audience for these? Everybody who knows about Instagram … knows about Instagram and can just follow these models themselves. So who are they trying to reach? Bored and horny men at work who can’t use IG on their work computers? 12-year-old boys trying to get around their parents’ porn filters?
A lot of their followers are other woman who may consider them to be influencers. They probably responded to different “news” articles that were tailored to their specific profile, not the hot chick in sexy bikini one you are receiving. It’s all about getting followers so that they can lay more claim to being an influencer.
I know a girl who does this and has a following of around 10k, she gets modeling gigs from local Victoria’s Secret marketing campaigns at Ohio State. And free cloths, she gets lots of free cloths. and accessories.
Presumably the same as the intended audience for the Instagram models themselves. Believe it or not, not everyone is on Instagram or other social media, or is comfortable with using them and following individuals on them. Especially with the way social media platforms seem to blossom and whither like a…short-blossom-period-flower (I am not a flower guy), a lot of fogeys and luddites just aren’t going to keep up with the New Hotness. But many of them will read Fox News, and click on links featuring pretty young women.
Somebody receives money if you click. The audience members are more likely to click on eye-catching things. Men are especially likely to click on eye catching things that involve almost-undressed women.
That’s what I’d assume they are. Or “paid for” articles. Once in a while I see a whole bunch of articles pop up for some random b-list celebrity and wonder why anybody cares. Then I assume it’s some agent’s attempt to get their client visibility by paying sites to run their “articles”. For a while there was a whole bunch of them for Ariel Winter from Modern Family?? Wondered who was really interested in knowing about her.
Well I looked her up and didn’t realize that she played young Trixie in Speed Racer the movie and was doing Cool Whip commercials in 2002 at the age of four. Fascinating stuff!
I think you are probably talking about Yahoo and yes, it’s click bait, everything on Yahoo is click bait. You may notice that when you click on the link, when the next page comes up, you are still within Yahoo, but:
There’s a video window that pre-rolls an ad (for which Yahoo gets paid)
Followed by a video produced by People (I don’t know if anybody pays anybody for that)
You scroll down and get to see the bikini, which is effectively also an ad for the sleb’s instagram
So Yahoo gets paid some infinitesimal amount for the click and you get to see the bikini. Who is the audience? People who want to see a chick in a bikini.
Man cannot live on “Elizabeth Warren Has A Scathing Theory On Where Lindsey Graham’s Spine Is” or “J K Rowling and the trans furore” alone.
In addition to yahoo, you’ll also see a lot of these on TMZ. The TMZ ones, while they may or may not be paid, are there because it’s celebrity gossip, and whether or not you consider instagram/youtube people celebrities, people that know them, or at least know the names, will read (click on) the articles.
The OP might just as well ask what the audience is for revealing photos of celebs and want-to-be celebs in tabloid newspapers. Come for the trashy news articles, stay for the bikini photos.
Other online news platforms host click-bait too. Fox News adds its own articles about how (for instance) Ms. Third-Tier Actress is coping with the pandemic by wearing a lot fewer clothes.
Stretching the definition of “click-bait” only slightly, I find it on mainstream network television news too: Just before the commercial they announce excitedly, “Coming right up…” with the headline for an interesting story. But “right up” could be 40 minutes later, and the story tells me almost nothing that I didn’t figure out from the headline.
