When Clickhole launched a year ago this month, it quickly became clear that the Onion sibling was the right site for the right moment. Designed to resemble the host of Facebook-feed-clogging traffic generators such as Upworthy, Distractify, Playbuzz, Viral Thread, and Shocktopia, Clickhole’s mission is to make a mockery of online media’s most gimmicky behavior (lists! quizzes! sales-pitch headlines!) and overreliance on viral-ready subjects such as celebrity gossip, 90s pop-culture nostalgia, reactionary politics, and personal essays.
What the brain trust at the Onion realized is that in order to survive it could imitate the patterns of the most successful media companies—pursuing high online traffic numbers in order to secure site sponsorships and higher digital ad rates—while simultaneously parodying those same media companies that dumb down content to generate readership. Publishing this material in the Onion, which already had an identity as a takeoff of newspapers, wouldn’t be the right fit. The obvious solution was to create an entirely new website.
Clickhole often seems like a reaction to a feeling that anyone who spends hours a day online staring into a screen can relate to: a restless ennui. In its most despair-filled articles, the site’s message is that virtual life is essentially unfulfilling.
Clickhole’s Blog section frequently and masterfully satirizes online writing’s most common, most nauseating trends.
Like any earnest media company, Clickhole uses Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to share its own content. But it also repurposes those same channels as a conduit for different styles of humor, refracting criticisms of social media through social media themselves. On its feeds, the site overlays absurd maxims and directives over various images. Emblazoned on a picture of a sun setting over a mountain range, for instance, is this text: “Like if you agree that the sun is impossible!”
A “They Said What?!” in April had Russell Crowe weighing in “on cultural differences”: “Whenever I hear an American say Aussies drive on the ‘wrong side of the road,’ I just lose it. You ever think about how those people grew up driving on the ‘wrong side of the road,’ watched a lot of people get hurt on the ‘wrong side of the road,’ die on the ‘wrong side of the road,’ while other people cheered from the ‘right side of the road’? Australia has a thing called Highway Fights, so it’s touchy.” When Clickhole posted it on Twitter, Crowe, not realizing what the site is, tweeted in reply: “What is this rubbish? Where does it come from?” He removed the tweet shortly afterward.
