"Elizabeth Warren is Clickbait" (CNN Money)
Elizabeth Warren is clickbait
5/1/15
Anyone in the online news business knows there are certain figures who draw consistent interest from readers.
Those same people will likely tell you that Senator Elizabeth Warren, the progressive doyenne who's cultivated a passionate national following in her two years on Capitol Hill, is clickbait.
It's a phenomenon that Vox's executive editor Matt Yglesias observed recently on Twitter.
"Social strat: when in doubt, link issue to Elizabeth Warren and watch the Facebook shares roll in," he tweeted.
It might seem odd to place a wonkish crusader against Wall Street in the same category as cat videos and celebrity slideshows, but Warren is an online sensation in her own right.
Perhaps the truest testament to her clickiness can be seen on Upworthy, the viral content factory that launched in 2012.
Warren has been featured in more than 40 Upworthy posts.
Three of those stories have generated more than one million page views -- more than any other public figure who's been covered by the site. Those posts rank among the top 5% of all of the stories published in the site's three-year history.
...The Massachusetts Democrat may be most attractive to left-leaning sites like Vox and proudly progressive sites like Salon.
But Warren stories are a hit on CNN, too....
...Yglesias wrote last month about Warren's "game-changing idea" to transform bank regulations, and the story was shared more than 8,000 times on Facebook. Vox editor-in-chief Ezra Klein's story in February about Warren's "furious" opposition to Obama's proposed trade deal was shared more than 3,000 times.
Compare that to Bernie Sanders, another progressive champion in the senate who just announced that he will run for president. When Vox wrote in January that Sanders was "livid" about the trade deal, it racked up only 188 Facebook shares....
http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/01/media/elizabeth-warrens-name-in-a-headline-is-clickbait/
She has far-reaching appeal & people want to hear what she has to say, that's for sure!