Guess these gilet prices and we’ll predict which bank you work at

Remember clickbait? It was bad, obviously. But it was also, briefly, quite good in a harmless way.

Between 20 and 10 years ago, BuzzFeed could afford to staff a serious newsroom by hosting silly but popular little quizzes about Hogwarts houses, inner potatoes, ousted Arab Spring rulers and suchlike.

It couldn’t last, so didn’t. Traffic from search engines crashed. Slop farms flooded the zone. Online advertisers switched from the open web to more trustworthy, targetable media vehicles such as short-form video apps, mobile games, and other short-form video apps. None but the most automated of content mills could pay the bills on clicks alone.

The effect was to turn everything upside down. Free-to-read blogs such as ours survived the shakeout through being subsidised by high-value paywalled journalism, not vice versa.

Our current way is better. The freedom of not answering directly to subscribers or worrying about hit quotas gives Alphaville a licence to be specialist, niche, technical, experimental, weird, unpopular and unserious. All that’s left is a gap in the market for silly little quizzes about Hogwarts houses, or whatever is their current equivalent.

Until now!

MainFT last week ran a well-read article about the best gilets for finance bros. For no good reason, we’ve taken the theme and made a BuzzFeed circa 2015-style quiz. Please remember that we don’t do these things for the clicks; we do them because we can.

Further reading:
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