In 2015, a BBC story headlined “Clickbait: The changing face of online journalism,” which explained how news publishers were increasingly using clicks for “simple economics; the more clicks you get, the more people on your site, the more you can charge for advertising.”

The story went on to say that, while clickbait headlines vary from “the intriguing to the misleading, [they] seem to be here to stay.”

A decade later, in 2025, it seems clickbait headlines are going out of fashion, at least in some places. Helsingin Sanomat, the largest subscription-based daily newspaper in Finland, recently declared it is abandoning clickbait headlines in all its media channels.

In an editorial, the newspaper’s Editor-in-Chief Erja Yläjärvi said clickbait headlines are often exaggerated and mysterious, and they should not be equalled to innovative or creative headlines.

Elaborating, she said clickbait headlines tend to use overly dramatic adjectives — describing things as “horrendous” or “surprising” or “astonishing” — and these terms are unnecessary in contemporary quality journalism.

Yläjärvi noted clickbait headlines emerged 10 years ago as competition for digital subscribers started in full force. At the time, they were a necessary tool to grasp readers’ attention as news outlets competed increasingly not just with each other but with social media platforms.

In many ways, the competition in this attention economy has not always been healthy, and monetising attention has proven difficult, as I wrote in my INMA report a while back.

She said that, as Helsingin Sanomat has 200,000 digital subscriptions, it is necessary for the newspaper to serve these readers rather than compete for readers’ attention with the media outlets that are freely available.

So, clickbait does not work anymore, or it does not work those with paying subscribers?

While I find this fascinating, I wonder how this fits with the pageview targets many news outlets still have — especially those still greatly dependent on advertising income.

Mirror’s Editor Caroline Waterston, for example, has defended pageview targets, saying that, “as a largely ad-funded model, pageviews are our digital currency. And while customers do not pay directly for their content, they give us their time and attention, which we measure most simply via these pageviews.”

Many newspapers have individual targets for online pageviews, and pageviews are often linked to the clickbait headlines and content. Remember cat videos?

Perhaps we need new kinds of metrics altogether. Many small nonprofit news organisations are changing the way they think about metrics, as noted by NiemanLab. Rather than measuring pageviews, likes, or some other similar metrics, these nonprofits are increasingly “defining success by impact on people served.”

While this puts focus on the public service function of journalism, it can also mean more engaged readers, contributing to the bottom line.

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