Last Updated on February 5, 2022
Listicles — articles that are made of up of ranked lists — are popular on blogs, but you need one critical ingredient.
Some bloggers, I realize, have a love-hate relationship with listicles. Some of us, for that matter, have a hate-hate relationship with the too-cute little word created to describe a list post, but that’s another story.
The other day, I ran across a post titled, “64 Ways to Think About a News Homepage.” You needn’t read it all right this second, click here and have a quick look. As you scroll, the first thing you undoubtedly notice is that it is presented as an actual list. Even better, it features actual visual examples of what it’s talking about.
I ran across another post titled, “Here are 27 ways to think about comments.” What’s striking about this particular post, on the other hand, is there’s no list. It’s a nearly 1,500-word article on the subject of website comments, a hot topic for bloggers, of course, that probably does have 27 ways within it to think about them.
But the difference between the two posts — at least to me — is striking. And it has me pondering why listicles have been and continue to be so popular.
Some say lists are popular because they are a cue to the reader the information will be organized in chunks that will be easier to process. It also means the ever-busier reader will have the opportunity to get a “snapshot” of the whole story while simultaneously being able to skip over parts of it that either don’t apply to them or don’t interest them.
Consider, for example, a list of the top 20 movies of all time. (I don’t have a link handy off the top of my head, but I’m sure there are plenty of them.) If 20 people wrote their own list of their 20 favorite films, you could well have 20 lists that don’t agree in any ranking. Some would surely list pictures like The Godfather, a movie I am perfectly willing to acknowledge is a well-made film, but a movie I’m also perfectly willing to acknowledge never having seen because I just don’t care for Mafia movies. Likewise, Westerns, which were already in the process of dying when I was born, don’t do it for me.
If I see that list of 20 great movies and I’m reading it because I want to see if there’s a film I might have missed but should see, I’m naturally going to skip over the write-ups about those kinds of pictures.
Yes, that means I may well miss information that might prompt me to take action by watching a movie I assume I’ll dislike.
But that’s the thing: I know what I’m looking for when I walk in the virtual door. If five of those 20 movie references are obviously in genres I’m not interested in, I can focus on the remaining 15. I know going in that I don’t necessarily have to sit through an unorganized list and first look for film titles.
Scientists have even discovered that we’re so peculiar about our lists that we are automatically “more comfortable” with lists with a rounded number of items:
According to the research, the human brain can more easily chunk numerical lists that end in zero such as 10, 20, or 30. For example, human beings chunk a list of 20 into the first 10 and second 10.
That means, ACI.org says, our little brains are much more happy when it’s a list of 10 things or 20 things or 50 things than, say, 4, 13, 27 or 64 things. Who knew?
To be honest, the number of items on the list doesn’t bother me. I’m happy to scan through a list of 64 items if there’s an actual list to scan. I think there’s a reason for that, too.
We’re just skeptical enough that we want the proof.
When you do a list post as an actual list, the reader can see at a glance that there are actually 18 things in your 18-thing list. Even if you use “bullets” instead of numerals for your list, we can still count those little black circles or asterisks or whatever you chose to use when a numeral would have unquestionably been better.
The list I linked to above featuring “27 ways” to think about comments may well have 27 ways in there. I’ve skimmed parts of the story a couple of time and already made a few notes of links within it that I want to follow. (But I was skimming while I was waiting for another website to finish processing a request, so my time was limited.)
To the average reader, it looks like a mountain of information to climb through to get all 27, and since there are no numbers delineating those 27, you know going in that you’re going to have to stop and read through the entire article to count all 27. It looks harder, so there are some people who won’t even put in the effort.
Yes, I recognize what a ridiculously sad commentary that is about our society these days.
But let’s be honest: somewhere, perhaps buried deep down in your psyche, you feel the same way. You want the information you’re interested in as quickly as you can get it. If you have in front of you an invitation to learn the 8 kitchen tools you need that can salvage any meal, or the 13 things you really need to have in your medicine cabinet, you want that information as quickly and efficiently as you can get it.
Think about it: why would you want anything else?
