Curiosity gap

The idea comes from behavioural economics, where an information gap is the low-level discomfort of knowing that you do not know something. Packaging exploits it directly. A title raises a question, and clicking is the cheapest way to make the itch stop. A working gap has to be narrow enough to read in about a second and honest enough that the video really does close it. Two failures show up constantly. One is a gap so vague that nobody feels it, and the other is a gap the video never closes. That second one is the practical definition of clickbait, and it is why retention collapses in the first minute.