About
ClickHole is a parody website created by the satirical news site The Onion to mock viral content websites like UpWorthy and BuzzFeed.
History
Announcement
On April 29th, 2014, The Onion announced a plan to launch a satirical viral content site named “ClickHole”[1] during its presentation at the Digital Content Newfronts conference. Slated for launch in June, the website originally featured an infographic with a tongue-in-cheek “stepy-by-step guide to clicking” and a “Click Me!” button with a real-time countdown to the launch date.
Site Launch
ClickHole officially launched on June 12th, 2014 with a number of satirical BuzzFeed-style lists and celebrity gossip articles, including “16 Pictures of Beyonce Where She’s Not Sinking in Quicksand” and “7 Pricks Who Defied the Odds and Didn’t Go Into Finance.” That day, Redditor RenaissanceGentleman submitted the site to the /r/InternetIsBeautiful[2] subreddit, where it received more than 6,700 upvotes and 340 comments in the first week.
Features
The site contains separate feeds for articles, videos, quizzes, blog posts and features, with a front page highlighting the most recent additions in each section. The quizzes typically mimic the format of those found on BuzzFeed (shown below, left), while videos are often presented to mock the social justice-oriented media featured on UpWorthy (shown below, right). Clickhole also has its own revenue stream through advertising on the site.
Traffic
Within one week of launch, ClickHole held a global rank of 39,350 and a United States rank of 4,180 on the traffic analytics site Alexa.[3]