Complete the Teasers if Charging for More

When I post on Bluesky with a live link in the Bluesky post to one of my RIMtailing blog posts, the title of the blog post and the first 25 words or so often appear in the Bluesky post. This teaser almost always ends in the middle of a sentence and often ends in the middle of a word. My intent is to have the teaser draw people for whom the topic is relevant into looking at the extended blog post. I’m aiming for the appeal of curiosity and the urge for completion.
     Evidence is this works, according to studies by a team of researchers from TBS Business School, ALDI Data & Analytics Services GmbH, Copenhagen Business School, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and Stockholm School of Economics.
     But the research also says this is true largely because there’s no fee to look at the complete content. If I required payment to go beyond teasers, that would quite legitimately activate in the reader a perception I’m trying to sell them something. Such persuasion knowledge, in turn, arouses sales resistance, making it substantially less likely the reader would choose to access the content.
     Consumers dislike the feeling they’re being manipulated. Any irritation would be aggravated by a teaser which ends in the middle of a word, sentence, or video scene. The researchers recommend that if you charge a fee for accessing full content, you end the teaser with a complete thought.
     Now at the other extreme of telling consumers too little is the possible risk of teasing them with too much, such as with spoilers in movie reviews. Researchers at University of Houston and Canada’s Western University defined “spoiler intensity” as the degree to which information in the spoiler reduces uncertainty about a central theme in the experience of watching the movie. Then, using a sample of 993 movies, they statistically analyzed the relationship between spoiler intensity on IMDB—the most popular movie review site—and box office revenues for the first eight weeks of the movie’s release.
     There was a positive relationship between spoiler intensity and box office revenue. The relationship was higher for movies in limited release, which supports the idea that the uncertainty reduction accounts for the value of spoilers. Spoilers increase the credibility of marketer claims and consumer reviews, so they’re of most use with relatively unknown items. In these circumstances, it seems like there’s little need to worry about spoiling the audience. Spoilers, in fact, increase the attraction.

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