You won't believe what The Onion is launching
Viral, click-baiting headlines are about to get The Onion treatment with ClickHole, an Upworthy-inspired satire site.
Buzzfeed and Upworthy are about to get some seriously silly competition. The Onion, known for its entertaining and sometimes controversial satire news stories, is promising to unleash ClickHole, described as "an all-new internet experience filled with content so shareable, snackable, and clickable, it will rob you of all logic and reason." That sounds like a pretty apt description of what happens when you visit BuzzFeed.
A placeholder page at clickhole.com looks forward to a June 2014 debut and includes an illustrated step-by-step guide to clicking with your mouse. It includes a practice "click" button at the bottom. It keeps track as you click, offering encouragement like "Good job!" and "You're almost there!" as you go.
ClickHole suggests you log between 800,000 and 12 million practice clicks to limber your fingers up before the new site goes live. You're going to need the muscles in order to spam your Facebook friends with headlines that once seen, can't be unseen.
The carefully crafted headlines that pull people into Upworthy have already received a considerable amount of mocking attention, but the trend seems like it's here to stay. It should give The Onion plenty to work with.
Before we get too crazy excited about the new venture, there's always an outside possibility that ClickHole itself is a joke that may never materialize. We don't want to become another entry in the long line of gullible believers of fake stories from The Onion, so we'll hedge our bets just slightly on this one. We will know for certain in June.