That was part of it - to my mind, the title was this agglomerated collection of words that needed decoding: "what's the noun / verb / etc.... ack, to heck with it, I'll click on the article and figure it out from there"

I know there's a limit on title length. If I may suggest a good eyeball catching title for this would be:

"It took Bezos 60 tries for him to get $1M for Amazon from 22 investors"

I needed 3 googles to understand the etymology. But seriously, why is ask being nounified where other verbs are not. I think it has something to do with the culture, but I cannot place my finger on it.