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Stop Pagination Now

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Re: Stop Pagination Now

#41

Post by mcpie »

0r3jq4a0j wrote: post #13
djloche wrote: post #10

>"Pagination persists because splitting a single-page article into two pages can, in theory, yield twice as many opportunities to display ads—though in practice it doesn’t because lots of readers never bother to click past the first page." As much as I hate it and would love to think that pagination is just a publication pipedream, it's not. Some online publications have spent (and will spend if they're interested in…

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

Pagination can in fact increase reading time. Most readers never finish an article. In fact, most readers drop out after the second paragraph. Not because the articles are shit, but because people have a short attention span.

By adding a 'next page' button, you create an incentive to keep reading. By spiking the curiosity of the reader to find out what's behind the bend, they linger instead of leaving.

Re: Stop Pagination Now

#42

Post by mcfunley »

> Pagination is one of the worst design and usability sins on the Web, the kind of obvious...

It's not obvious. It depends on the situation. At Etsy, we experimented with infinite scroll in search and pretty much every metric we cared about got worse. But we do use it successfully in other contexts.

The thing that annoys me about this article is that it could mention A/B results in some way, but it doesn't. He's just countering some editor's opinion with his own.

Re: Stop Pagination Now

#44

Post by malsme »

ollysb wrote: post #33
djloche wrote: post #10

>"Pagination persists because splitting a single-page article into two pages can, in theory, yield twice as many opportunities to display ads—though in practice it doesn’t because lots of readers never bother to click past the first page." As much as I hate it and would love to think that pagination is just a publication pipedream, it's not. Some online publications have spent (and will spend if they're interested in…

What's the difference between showing adverts on the next page or adverts further down the same page? They could continue all the way to the bottom of the page. Not that I want to see this but it would be an improvement on paged articles.

The comment higher up says A/B testing is used, that may be true for publishers that make use of performance ads. If you're a well known entity then you try to only accept brand ads (CPM - pay per impression/view), and those brand ads come with lots of conditions.

Advertisers want to appear near the top of the page or near the top of the content - that's why ad networks have rules about the placement of ads. Even Google (which is more performance than brand) limits the number of units that are displayed on a single page.

If your ads are at the top then there's a good chance that they will appear on the user's screen. If your ads are at the bottom and the user found the article boring then the browser was closed before seeing the ad, yet the impression was still paid for (hence, much lower rates).

Re: Stop Pagination Now

#45

Post by TeMPOraL »

tl; dr: I never realized people may have such different ways of using the Internet.

I am surprised by the differences in opinions here; it's kind of like there were two completely different worlds. For example, I have an exactly opposite opinion to ps2000 [0] - single page long articles are the best and I never get lost in them, because, well, every browser has a visual position indicator, also known as "scroll bar". And I love infinite scrolling of Google Images; I'd hate to have click "next page" several times.

Similarly, I completely disagree with mcpie [1] - for what I saw, it's the "next page" button where people lose their interest. One-page articles have one huge benefit: you can skim them before reading. For example, it takes me about 15 seconds to skim an article and decide whether or not commit another 10 minutes for reading it. And for that sole reason, if I can't skim an article because someone cut it into 10 pages, I usually decide it's not worth reading.

Then there are A/B tests [2] [3] which completely blow my mind, because I feel like I'm living in a completely different world, and there is this HUGE mass of people out there, people of whom I saw or know no one, who actually click on web ads, and love paginated articles, etc. and they are the majority, they are the income source of the Internet, and I have never seen a single representant of this huge group. So I'm confused. Are we really so different?

[0] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606143

[1] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606388

[2] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606437

[3] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606081

Re: Stop Pagination Now

#46

Post by SjuulJanssen »

mushishi wrote: post #16
SjuulJanssen wrote: post #12

Autopatchwork rocks! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autopatchwork/aeol...

I wish it worked. I actually browsed through Postgresql documentation last night, and thought this kind of a thing would be useful as it is paginated into a lot of subsections. But the plugin didn't seem to have any effect. edit: Within minutes it has shown to be useful on other sites. Thanks for the suggestion.

It depends on whether the page uses rel="next"

Re: Stop Pagination Now

#47

Post by ollysb »

malsme wrote: post #44
ollysb wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the difference between showing adverts on the next page or adverts further down the same page? They could continue all the way to the bottom of the page. Not that I want to see this but it would be an improvement on paged articles.

The comment higher up says A/B testing is used, that may be true for publishers that make use of performance ads. If you're a well known entity then you try to only accept brand ads (CPM - pay per impression/view), and those brand ads come with lots of conditions. Advertisers want to appear near the top of the page or near the top of the content - that's why ad networks have rules about the placement of ads. Even Goo…

This is the same with paged content, the user is equally less likely to see the adverts because maybe they don't view that page/scroll down that far.

I'm guessing the issue is that if you use paged content you know that the user has looked at that part of the article. If the adverts are all on the same page then an impression is not proof that a user has had that advert appear on the screen. Having said that if bootstrap's scrollspy can detect when you've scrolled content into view then I don't see why you shouldn't be able to track advert views in the same way.

Re: Stop Pagination Now

#48

Post by [deleted] »

malsme wrote: post #44
ollysb wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the difference between showing adverts on the next page or adverts further down the same page? They could continue all the way to the bottom of the page. Not that I want to see this but it would be an improvement on paged articles.

The comment higher up says A/B testing is used, that may be true for publishers that make use of performance ads. If you're a well known entity then you try to only accept brand ads (CPM - pay per impression/view), and those brand ads come with lots of conditions. Advertisers want to appear near the top of the page or near the top of the content - that's why ad networks have rules about the placement of ads. Even Goo…

[deleted]

Re: Stop Pagination Now

#50

Post by dspillett »

ollysb wrote: post #33
djloche wrote: post #10

>"Pagination persists because splitting a single-page article into two pages can, in theory, yield twice as many opportunities to display ads—though in practice it doesn’t because lots of readers never bother to click past the first page." As much as I hate it and would love to think that pagination is just a publication pipedream, it's not. Some online publications have spent (and will spend if they're interested in…

What's the difference between showing adverts on the next page or adverts further down the same page? They could continue all the way to the bottom of the page. Not that I want to see this but it would be an improvement on paged articles.

> What's the difference between showing adverts on the next page or adverts further down the same page?

If you are selling views, that will not wash with the advertiser as you can't reliably tell if the user has scrolled to see the lower adverts (whereas you can easily see if they clicked to see page two).

Of course even now your stats are going to over-count already (the ad may stil count as a view if there was an error on the ad server, or if the user had a proxy or plugin that blocked it (depending how that blocking is done), and so on) but that particular source of uncertainty is already accepted as an unavoidable consequence of the way the tech works, where the advertisers will see the "can't really tell if they saw the lower one" issue as a solved problem: just put the lower content and adverts on a new page.

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