What kind of clickbait numbers is BuzzFeed using in their titles? Let's see some stats, based on their RSS feeds.

analyze-buzzfeed-clickbait.php

<?php
//What kind of clickbait numbers is BuzzFeed using in their titles these days?

$feeds = [
	"animals",
	//"celeb",
	"tvandmovies",
	"food",
	"fwd",
	"lgbt",
	"music",
	"politics",
	"rewind",
	"sports",
	"lol",
	"win",
	"omg",
	"cute",
	"geeky",
	"trashy",
	"fail",
	"wtf",
	"australia",
	"books",
	"brasil",
	"comics",
	"diy",
	"longform",
	"tech",
	"travel",
	"quiz",
	"world",
	"health",
// 	"espanol",
// 	"france",
//	"ideas",	//Obsoleted?
//	"usnews",	//Obsoleted?
//	"uknews",   //Obsoleted?
//	"aunews",   //Obsoleted?
//	"community",//Obsoleted?
];
$titles = [];

//Get the titles
foreach ($feeds as $feed) {

	echo "\rGetting $feed feed...         ";
	$feedUrl = 'http://www.buzzfeed.com/'.$feed.'.xml';

	$rawXmlString = @file_get_contents($feedUrl);
	if ($rawXmlString !== FALSE) {
		$contentObj = simplexml_load_string($rawXmlString);
		if ($contentObj !== FALSE) {

			$result = $contentObj->xpath('/rss/channel/item/title');

			
			//$newResults = array_map(function($t){ return html_entity_decode($t);}, array_values($result));
			$titles = array_merge($titles, array_values($result));
		}
	} else {
		echo "\nSomething is wrong with this feed. Look into it: ".$feedUrl."\n";
	}
}

//Analyze the titles for the presence of clickbait numbers
foreach ($titles as $title) {

	//Clickbait numbers are almost always at the very beginning of the title. That's what we look for.
	//However, we allow titles that begin with certain words followed by numbers to count
	//Les is French, Os and As are Portuguese, Los is Spanish
	if (preg_match('/^(Top|The|Our|Les|Os|As|Los)?\s*(\d{1,3})\s+/', $title, $matches) === 1) {
		$titlesWithNumbers[] = $title;
		$clickbaitNumbers[] = $matches[2];
	} else {
		$titlesWithoutNumbers[] = $title;
	}

}

//Find the special numbers
$modeValues = array_count_values($clickbaitNumbers);
$mode = array_search(max($modeValues), $modeValues);

$roundedMean = number_format(array_sum($clickbaitNumbers) / count($clickbaitNumbers));

//Stolen from http://www.mdj.us/web-development/php-programming/calculating-the-median-average-values-of-an-array-with-php/
sort($clickbaitNumbers);
$count = count($clickbaitNumbers); //total numbers in array
$middleval = floor(($count-1)/2); // find the middle value, or the lowest middle value
if($count % 2) { // odd number, middle is the median
	$median = $clickbaitNumbers[$middleval];
} else { // even number, calculate avg of 2 medians
	$low = $clickbaitNumbers[$middleval];
	$high = $clickbaitNumbers[$middleval+1];
	$median = (($low+$high)/2);
}


$totalArticleCount = count($titlesWithNumbers) + count($titlesWithoutNumbers);

echo "\rAbout ".number_format((count($titlesWithNumbers) / $totalArticleCount)*100)."% of the ".$totalArticleCount." BuzzFeed articles we found use clickbait-style numbers.\n\n";
echo "The number $mode occurred the most often.\n";
echo "$roundedMean was the average of the integers used.\n";
echo "$median was the median of all the clickbait numbers.\n";


$sampleCount = 10;
shuffle($titlesWithNumbers);
shuffle($titlesWithoutNumbers);

echo "\nA random sampling of $sampleCount titles with clickbait numbers:\n=====\n".implode("\n", array_slice($titlesWithNumbers, 0, $sampleCount))."\n\n";
echo "A random sampling of $sampleCount titles without clickbait numbers:\n=====\n".implode("\n", array_slice($titlesWithoutNumbers, 0, $sampleCount))."\n\n";

As of today, this is still working! 👍