Stop Pagination Now

I can assure you that this is absolutely not the case. If you look at Plotz's comment, it's exactly what most editors will say:

Pages that run too long can irritate readers. We run stories of 2,000, 4,000, even 6,000 words, and to run that much text down a single page can daunt and depress a reader. So pagination can make pages seem more welcoming, more chewable.

They really believe this.

It's important to realize that despite all the buzz about A/B testing in the industry, editors pretty universally believe they don't need to validate their opinions through testing. Why not? Because though school and their careers they've been told that their opinions matter, and, in fact, that's all their job really is: voicing opinions and making judgements, because they believe they have special insight into what readers want.

Look no further than Poltz, a writer and editor with no software design or development experience, who somehow believes he's qualified to make that statement.

I think this is much more common than sophisticated A/B testing.

At our publication, we were able to make the business case that the added pageviews from pagination didn't make much of an impact on the bottom-line. Because we generally run out of premium ad inventory each month anyway, most of the extra impressions were just for extremely low-revenue, Google-served remnant ads. Again, some publications thrive on volume, but it's a tough way to make money as CTR on Google ads is very low.

>If it didn't improve their revenues, they wouldn't be doing it.

The publishing industry has not always been about maximizing profits. The weird hybrid of advertising and reader-supported has created a different mentality in the business. There are plenty of things that publishers still do- like supporting foreign correspondents- that are driven more by the editorial side of than the business side.

Pagination is better than no navigation, this is why Google Image Search is weird to navigate. The absence of proper pagination may be even the reason Google Wave has found no friends beyond its believers.

Pagination sucks when text length per page is too short and even more when 50% of the content consists of advertisements. I avoid such websites.