By Dayton Kennard
If you haven’t heard of Oola, it’s basically a website that posts articles on restaurants, food, and houseware. However, if you found out about it through its ads on apps such as Snapchat, you’d expect something a bit different.
In its ads on Snapchat, it links you to an article similar to a “top-ten” article, such as “People Share The Stories Behind Why They Left A Terrible Tip Or No Tip At All While Dining Out*” and “Servers Share The Most Outlandish, Idiotic Thing A Customer Has Ever Done**” to name a few. After reading one, you may be enticed to click on one of the tabs on the Oola website to read more articles like this, but to your surprise, you’ll find nothing of the sort. Instead, the website is full of articles with food recipes for special occasions, everyday dinners, and other recipe-related articles. You may try all of the tabs on the top of their website, but you won’t be able to find the article you just read.
“What’s happening?” you may ask yourself. The truth is, these articles are often hidden in categories that are not listed in plain sight, such as “Stories” and “Restaurants,” which are sub-categories of “Life in Flavor.” Some articles, however, are listed in easily accessible categories such as “Social Life,” but even if you look through the articles in that category you won’t be able to find anything like what you’ve just read. Why is this? It’s likely something similar to YouTube’s “Unlisted” videos, where you won’t see the content when looking at a general page/tab that you’d expect them to be in and that you can only access if the creator of that content gives you a direct link to it.
Let’s talk about the Oola articles themselves now. They’re formatted as multiple brief paragraphs telling stories related to the article’s overall main point, and each has an image that’s somewhat related to the story. These paragraphs are encased in quotation marks, indicating that they are from different people. If we look harder at these posts, though, there will only be one author attributed for the post (such as Brianna Morton), and all of the pictures will be from a stock photo company (such as Shutterstock or Flicker). The photos will have the username of the person who originally uploaded it, and if you click on the name of the author you will see more articles with this same style. Furthermore, these articles will almost never use the actual name of the restaurants, with the acception of a few references such as “owl-themed restaurant” and “subway-themed restaurant.”
While these articles may be entertaining, they are most certainly click-bait articles intended for the purpose of advertisement and popularity. If you’re interested in reading a few of them, there are links to two of the stories at the bottom of this post.
Editor: Leo Milmet
*https://www.oola.com/social-life/2298681/people-share-the-stories-behind-why-they-left-a-terrible-tip-or-no-tip-at-all-while-dining-out/**https://www.oola.com/restaurants/2297741/servers-share-the-most-outlandish-idiotic-thing-a-customer-has-ever-done/
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