It’s some time during the 2010s, and you’re scrolling. You come across half a dozen headlines describing articles to read. Some of them are interesting enough, but you’re scrolling quickly, and slowing down to read a full article doesn’t feel quite right.
Your salvation comes when you finally see 7 Things Only Smart People Know. You’re smart, so you want to test yourself—but quickly, please!
You’ve found a listicle. This silly term combining list with article (sorry, it’s not testicle) came about during a time when the internet was also coming up with terms like podcast, clickbait, and blogosphere.
Prior to the 2010s, though, people absolutely loved listicles, even if the term itself had just been invented. You might remember newspaper headlines beyond the front page, where the idea was to rope the reader in. I’m pretty sure I was several times more likely to read something in the newspaper if it had a top ten list.
This goes back quite a bit, as you might imagine. Papers in the 1800s routinely reprinted entire articles from other newspapers in order to fill space and sell ads—a sort of print version of something going viral. It was clickbait, but you didn’t have to click.
Among the most successful of these was a list called Facts Worth Noting. More than 120 newspapers carried a version of the list between 1853 and 1899, changing the titles but keeping much of the content. It’s fair to say that things took a lot longer to go viral back then!
Our obsession with lists goes way, way back.
During the Middle Ages, the Seven Deadly Sins was among the hottest viral sensations. There wasn’t some magical number of sins prescribed as particularly deadly, but this was instead a very useful heuristic for remembering what the listed sins were.
Lists with the number seven are also very popular, and have been for a long, long time. Think about the seven wonders of the ancient world—basically, the ancient world’s version of 7 Places to See Before You Die.
Lists are very useful, of course:
They offer a nice little page break for the reader
You can often get people interested in what you’re writing if they know there’s a list inside
I forget, but it’s generally better to have a list of 3 things than of 2
1. When I was freelance writing for Cracked.com around 2013 (way back before it was taken over and gutted and became crappy), listicles were basically THE format of the Internet. Their whole DNA was about lists of [unexpected/counterintuitive facts], and to even kick off the submission/approval process, you had to find an angle and at least 6 examples of that thing.
2. Noticed that listicles, while still used, aren't quite as ubiquitous these days.
3. Good times.
4. You thought I was done?
5. Ha, you fool!
One of the things I hate is when my listicles snag on the edge of the car seat when deboarding.
Oh wait. You said it wasn't that. Never mind.