Top 5 Reasons People Like Top 5 Lists

5. People are bored

The first thing to understand is that most of the time people read lists for entertainment because they’re bored, which – let’s be honest- usually means they’re at work. This also means that they probably aren’t looking for long, engaging articles even if it’s something they are interested in because that would be too obvious that they aren’t actually working. Most people can easily get away with browsing a list every once in a while as long as they remember to switch back to excel as soon as they hear footsteps coming.

4. People are “busy”
Even when someone see an article with a title that’s tantalizing enough to click on, it takes a lot more than just an interesting topic to keep them on a web page longer than five seconds, much less actually read it. People have more important things to do (like tweeting about the rice ratio in their spicy tuna roll, googling themselves or browsing other top 5 lists that probably won’t actually teach them anything of real value). So if you have something to say, keep it simple and straight to the point (make a list) if you want people to pay attention.

3. People are impatient

Impatience can be compared to laziness except that it has an increased sense of urgency. For example, instead of a lazy response like: “That paragraph is way too long for me to bother reading it. I’d rather just browse netflix and rate movies,” you get an impatient response like: “ARGH! Why don’t they bold the headings so I don’t have to scan all of the mumbo jumbo to find the info I’m really looking for!” If you spend a lot of time on the internet, you know exactly what I mean.

2. People don’t care what you think

Refer to impatient response in #3. People don’t really care what you have to say about whatever subject you are discussing. By including “Top (insert number here) List” in your article title, you are letting people know that they can get in, out and on with their day by quickly browsing a list instead of otherwise having to search for info in tedious blocks of text which people usually assume will be pointless babble (like this).

1. People are lazy

This one is pretty self-explanatory. People are just too lazy to read entire paragraphs these days. This can safely be blamed it on the fact that reading large blocks of text on a computer screen is a little more strenuous on the eyes than reading one in a book. But considering the dwindling amount of people who actually read books – real ones, not kindles or audiobooks, it still comes down to the fact that people are just plain lazy. If you even finished reading this, you are probably feeling proud of yourself for accomplishing something.

Tags: internet culture, top 5 list