unintuitive

I am struck by how ubiquitous the headline that begins “Who else wants [X]“ has become. Take a look at this Google search for the phrase “who else wants”: 640,000 results. Yes, that’s right. A few thousand internet copywriters (and I use that term loosely) have saturated the ‘net with more than half a million variations on this terrible headline.

How did this happen? Why has this particular phrase, of all possible combination of words in the English language, been so thoroughly driven into the ground? Who is responsible for this scourge of hackneyed boilerplate?

I’m blaming the Copyblogger, Brian Clark. And, more specifically, his legion of mindless readers.

Let’s take a closer look at some Google searches for the Copyblogger’s 10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas that Work and his follow-up 7 More Sure-Fire Headline Templates and see how many results we can come up with:

• Who Else Wants [X]: 640,000 results
• Here is a Method that is Helping [X] to [Y]: 16,100
• Here’s a Quick Way to [X]: 20,200
• What Everyone Ought to Know About [X]: 93,400
• Have a [X] You Can Be Proud Of: 380,000
• If You Don’t [X] Now, You’ll Hate Yourself Later: 18,000
• Do You Recognize the [X] Early Warning Signs of [Y]?: 72,700

What’s the total number of sure-fire headlines that suck? Countless millions, no doubt!

So, obviously, I’m picking Mr. Clark a little bit. It’s not his fault that the headlines he wrote about have become so grotesquely popular. They aren’t his headlines, after all. Most of them were written by icons of copywriting like Ogilvy and Caples and used to sell snake oil dozens of years before Brian was born. There are plenty of copywriters out there use those same 10 or 15 headlines, and they’ve never even heard of Copyblogger dot com. Hard to believe, I know!

And it’s certainly not the fault of Copyblogger readers that they’re hacks who couldn’t come up with an original thought if their lives depended on it.

Wait, yes it is.