BBC clickbait: the ellipses are out in force
I'm not sure what rules the BBC's website content management system has in place, but it makes the home page look bloody odd at times. Of these five video links, all but one were truncated with an ellipsis. But the truncated text was insubstantial in terms of the space required to show it as part of the link text.
For the idly curious, the lost text was as follows:
- Shauna Lennon: From wheelchair to walking on stage at graduation
- Bluey: How a cartoon dog became a role model for dads
- Will Smith acknowledges that Oscar slap was wrong
- Notre-Dame Cathedral on track to reopen in 2024
Do you notice something common to all of them? Each is missing just one word, the absence of which is enough to raise the reader's curiosity. And in each case its presence is enough to help you understand whether the video's subject might be of interest, without having to click on the link. None of them would've pushed the text onto a third line.
So a critical final word is removed for no apparent benefit to page layout. I suppose that it could be coincidental application of a general character limit rule. Besides the text removed prior to the colon in the first two, the full text was 46–49 characters long, including spaces, and each had been truncated to 39–44 characters. I guess that you could devise a rule around that: any words beyond 45 characters are truncated, for example. This could explain why the single line link wasn't affected.
But, otherwise, it just looks like clicky-baity tactics, really.