I'm in the process of putting together a social experiment that draws some similar conclusions to what people have addressed here. The idea is to create 365 link bait titles and then back fill them with content and publish one article per day for one year. My hypothesis is that you could effectively create a publishing company without great content, very well engineered titles, and social media for the marketing. If anyone is interested in helping, feel free to get in contact! I've already built some guidelines and have a list of titles ready to go.
