I really liked the zoomed out screenshot of the demo website. When you look at it like that it is amazing to see just how little "content" there is and just how much sidebar and advertising there is.
Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles
21–30 of 45 posts
Re: Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles
#22...only a tiny percentage of viewers will actually read page two... Actually, quite a large percentage of my readers click to page two. If only a tiny number of your readers are bothering to click a link to get the rest of your content, perhaps your content isn't very good.
This makes me wonder: Is it possible that some sites paginate their articles not just to increase ad views, but so that they can measure how much of the articles are being read?
With tracking software that I've used (omniture site catalyst) you can track the average length of time on spent page, which gives you a really good idea if the article is being read through or not, without pagination
Re: Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles
#23I'd agree that artificially inflating page views is the primary reason for this practice, but I do wonder if any other things contribute. For example, I believe there is an antiquated and probably flawed notion out there that readers dislike really long pages, so they like their content broken up. Does anyone think something like that has anything do with it as well?
> For example, I believe there is an antiquated and probably flawed notion out there that readers dislike really long pages
To be honest, I do dislike really long pages. I tend to read longer articles piecewise. Read a bit, do something else, read some more, do something else, etc. Long pages usually have very little points where I can anchor my memory. All paragraphs look alike and I have to read several paragraphs before I've found the point where I stopped reading. That's highly distracting. I prefer pages for long articles.
Re: Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles
#24I'd agree that artificially inflating page views is the primary reason for this practice, but I do wonder if any other things contribute. For example, I believe there is an antiquated and probably flawed notion out there that readers dislike really long pages, so they like their content broken up. Does anyone think something like that has anything do with it as well?
The main purpose of this is not to inflate page view statistics, as such, but to increase the available 'ad inventory'. By making users click, you are able to refresh the page and serve a new ad.
Re: Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles
#25I really liked the zoomed out screenshot of the demo website. When you look at it like that it is amazing to see just how little "content" there is and just how much sidebar and advertising there is.
See also, Merlin Mann's "Noise-to-Noise Ratio" series:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/merlin/sets/72157622077100537/d...
Re: Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles
#26You have no room to be picky about pagination if your URLs look like that.
Re: Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles
#27Well, not all pagination is bad. On very long articles (like the Ars review of Snow Leopard[1]) the pagination is actually useful. It's the exception to the rule, granted.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.a...
Re: Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles
#28A one-size-fits all design philosophy generally fails...
But it doesn’t really work as well as you had hoped because only a tiny percentage of viewers will actually read page two.
Uh, perhaps only the same tiny-or-not percentage who go to page two will page down to the bottom of a long one page article. But breaking up the page, you can tell who's seeing what.
Real print magazines would make things more straight forward if they broke up their articles but the approach is pretty well established by now.
Once you yave content the people want, they will work to get it and you've got an incentive to monetize that search. That might not be every site but it's certainly some sites. Everyone's asking how you monetize content that is better than some minimal effort. Multiple pages is one idea...
Re: Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles
#29You have no room to be picky about pagination if your URLs look like that.
Somehow that makes sense... oh wait, no.
Also, why does the URL need to be human-readable? URLs are for computers. The content is for the human.
Re: Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles
#30They're doing it to increase adviews. Why not just put more ads on each page? At the point where the page would get split, just put an ad.
If they jam pack the page with ads then the page will load slower and probably be unacceptable in terms of page response time.