You see that genius headline in the screengrab up there? It’s not sheer fluke or your depravity that caused it to catch your eye, oh no. In fact, the Huffington post cleverly runs A/B split tests on all their headlines. It works like this: whenever a new story is published it’s given two headlines (A & B). Half the audience will be served headline A on the site and half headline B. Whichever one performs best in the first five minutes (easily enough time for such a high profile site) is the winner and is used from that point forwards. There’s no reason that this sort of testing couldn’t work on other sites too (so long as both options stay live long enough to garner a sufficient number of views). Let’s get optimising!
Read more here.