1) They're spoon feeding you. Numbered lists as commonly used by clickbait articles break down information into short and easily digestible chunks; acclimatising your mind to shorter sentences, smaller words and creating an environment that requires little active critical thought. Essentially the abundance of clickbait and the lack of longer form articles leaves you with a lower tolerance for articles that require more attention.
2) The content doesn't matter. The headline, photo and ads are the real meat of a clickbait article; the article is only there to provide an excuse to exploit their audience and deliver them too advertisers. This isn't true of all cases; sometimes an ordinary article will be named in a clickbait fashion to garner additional attention, but true clickbait is generally what makes up for gaps in longer-form content or a lack of income.
3) It's all the same. Clickbait follows a pretty well established formula for getting views; exploit fears (either to make you scared of something you wouldn't have been or to down play common fears) use numbers (numbers break down information; exploit a fear of missing out on information and gives the audience an idea of how long the article is) and challenge or be seen to oppose dominant ideas (Health professionals hate this simple trick, 10 reasons why the Beatles weren't a good band etc.).
Again, going back to the second point, the content does not matter, your emotional reaction is what they exploit; regardless of how you react to the information it's the strength of the reaction that makes you click, either to see your view justified or to feel righteously indignant. Click on the scrappy image I made below to get an idea of the general structure a lot of clickbait follows.
4) Outrage and controversy sells. People like Nicole Arbour aren't just bumbling into stupid controversy accidentally; it's calculated and considered. Her comments and views are nasty, oppositional and attack one particular group for no other reason than to advance a healthy-centric notion of superiority based on ones size. By dividing opinion and deliberately sparking controversy she created for herself a great tool of promotion; people argued with eachother over the video; giving it further views.
Of course this isn't only done for what I personally think are negative purposes; Anita Sarkeesian went from broader criticism of movies and TV shows to focusing on "Tropes vs. Women in videogames". I'm a big feminist and while I don't always totally agree with everything Sarkeesian says her overall perspective on videogame tropes as arising out of patriarchal norms is scathing and broadly speaking a very important message. To push her (and mine, for the sake of further revealing obvious bias on my part) views further she exploits the defensive nature of many people that play games to generate, maintain and utilise the opposition she gets. While her critics might argue that, for example, titling a video "25 invisible benefits of gaming while male" is an attempt at a cash grab; I would argue that it's more about pushing awareness further. So, to be clear, not all clickbait is inherently bad, but you've got to critically look at why something is being pushed in that form.
5) It's probably not true. Clickbait frequently describes it's content as scientific, but rarely has any basis in fact. You might have noticed by now, but I'm talking out of my arse at the moment. But none of that matters for websites; it's far more profitable to publish an inaccurate article and apologise later than to publish an accurate one because the site has already garnered its revenue, and people are far more likely to click on something that has some supposed value to it.
So. This post really was a bit of an experiment. One was whether using clickbait techniques in naming would garner a higher view count. Another was to see how people react to deliberately exploitative and false content, there is no scientific proof of anything that I'm saying (or at least nothing I've seen or based arguments off of). I put a little more effort into this than I might have were it an actual clickbait article and I didn't want the thing to be really awful just for the sake of experimenting with form and content, but this isn't going to be a regular thing.
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