Word of the week: Chumbox

This discovery will shock you! Or maybe not.

Oh, swell, another way in which The Entity Formerly Known as Twitter is being enshittified.¹

Here’s Matt Bi.nder in Mashable (October 6, 2023):

X, the Elon Musk-owned platform formerly known as Twitter, has begun serving its users with a weird new ad format and it's one of the company’s least transparent products yet. …

The type of content being promoted in the ads that Mashable has viewed appear [sic] to be consistent with ads found in spammy, low quality “chumbox” advertising – typically defined as those clickbait ads found at the bottom of posts on content farm sites – made popular by native ad networks like Taboola. 

"This Seems Unbelievable, But Happens in Dubai Everyday" reads one ad that takes users to a third-party content mill website, overloaded with ads of its own. "These Incredibly Cool Gadgets That Are Going To Sell Out This Year. Action Now!" and "If you suffer from ringing ears (Tinnitus) you're going to love this recent breakthrough" are other examples of some of the content found in these X ads.

(Emphasis added.)

“Here's another example of X's shady chumbox-esque advertising.” - via Mashable

You’ve probably seen ads like these for years, and so have I, but—possibly unlike you—until last week I never knew they were called chumbox. The term, says Wikipedia, “derives from the fishing practice of ‘chumming’, the use of fish meat as a lure for fish.” More specifically: dead, rotting fish. A 2019 New York Times article explained that “these ads comprise arresting images and baffling text. They have one goal: to make readers click. And when they do, readers may find themselves on an unfamiliar website with an odd name, faced with a photo gallery of regrettable tattoos or a listicle on 22 celebrities with ugly spouses.”

The internet use of chumbox goes back to the early 2010s, so I really have no excuse for never having noticed it previously. (I had called them clickbait, another internet term with a fishing provenance.) The largest purveyor is a company called Taboola, which was founded in Israel in 2007, originally as a recommendation engine for video content. (Having failed to find a name story for Taboola, I’ll speculate that it’s an alteration of tabbouleh, the Middle Eastern salad made from parsley and other chopped ingredients. There may be a soupçon of “boola-boola” in there as well, although Taboola’s founder did not attend Yale University.)

In 2015, The Awl presented “a complete taxonomy of internet chum.” Categories included Sexy Thing and Localized Rule; Old Person’s Face, Skin Thing, and Miracle Cure Thing; and Disgusting Invertebrates or Globular Masses Presented as Weird Food.

Chumbox ads captured by The Awl in 2015.

Fishing chum is unrelated to “friend” chum. The latter comes from British university slang and is modified from “chamber,” as in “chamber mate.” The origin of fishing chum is unclear, but the word may be related to champ (to chew noisily), as in champing at the bit.

Chum box from Lee Fisher Sports, “Your Fishing Partner”

I have a little digression, inspired by something I noticed in the fourth paragraph of the Mashable story:

Mashable has confirmed this ad format with numerous users from across X and have seen a variety of different ads running this bizarre new format that just consists of written copy text, a photo, and a fake avatar that's sole purpose is to make the ad look like an organically posted tweet. 

See that highlighted “that’s”? It isn’t a contraction of that is or that has. It’s an ungrammatical substitute for whose. Yes, we English speakers use whose for inanimate references. We’ve been doing it for centuries.

When I pointed out Mashable’s use of “that’s” on Bluesky², Stan Carey replied that he’d written about that’s/thats back in 2013. “It’s meaning is clear in context,” he’d written back then. (The post’s clever title: “I guess that’s why they call ‘thats’ the ‘whose.’”) Neil Whitman wrote about that’s for the Visual Thesaurus in 2011, noting that for some educated writers it’s now “normal.” And James Harbeck defended thats in a 2015 column for The Week. All three gentlemen are fine writers and editors, and I appreciate their efforts but I, for one, remain unswayed.

1. See also: “Bots on X worse than ever according to analysis of 1m tweets during first Republican primary debate,” The Guardian, September 8, 2023

2. One of the platforms to which I’ve migrated post-Twitter. It’s still invitation-only, but if you’re already there, I’m @fritinancy.