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Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles

marco.org

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Re: Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles

#31

Post by gr366 »

tvon wrote: post #27

Well, 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...

Great point. Pagination in harmony with the content (splitting across sections or chapters of a longer article) is valuable to a user. It's easier to bookmark or remember I was on page 4 of that Ars Technica review, or to send a specific URL of a relevant page in a long-form article to a friend.

The problem is with arbitrarily introduced page breaks, where it is doing a disservice to the user in favor of inflating page views.

Re: Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles

#32

Post by brown9-2 »

I know you’re double-charging your advertisers for the same story by artificially inflating your pageview count. It’s just like the old auto-frame-refresh trick, but this one’s better because most of the ad networks haven’t banned it yet.

So I don't have any direct experience with this, and I'm not an advertiser, but I would think that advertisers would be happy with this, no?

It's a chance to get more ads in front of the viewer (of the same content).

Frame auto-refreshing sounds like an out-and-out way to cheat the advertisers, but this is really just increasing the ad to content ratio in a way that isn't always directly obvious to the end viewer (and is not as nasty as covering 95% of the screen in ads).

Do advertisers actually dislike this practice?

Re: Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles

#33

Post by fallintothis »

jrockway wrote: post #29
teye wrote: post #26

You 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.

Also, why does the URL need to be human-readable? URLs are for computers. The content is for the human.

Disagreed. I can't stand sites with ugly, incomprehensible URLs: even if they're just appending parameters ad infinitum, it's unnecessary drag on the process of editing, sharing, and typing the URL. E.g., something like

  http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Books/b/ref=sa_menu_kbo0/187-1539918-5044028?_enc
  oding=UTF8&node=1286228011&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=left-nav-1&pf_rd_r=05
  F7VG5R8T4MBDH7QQ6N&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=328655101&pf_rd_i=507846
is, near as I can tell, mostly equivalent to

  http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Books/b/ref=sa_menu_kbo0/187-1539918-5044028?node
  =1286228011
and could probably be made even simpler. Of course sites need to carry some amount of incomprehensible information (YouTube's video IDs, reddit's story IDs, marco.org's blog post numbers, etc.), but shoving as much as you can into the URL isn't the way to do it. I type specific URLs like en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic and news.ycombinator.com/newest all the time. If the site author neglects to even have this sort of basic functionality, I tend to consider it a bad interface.

Re: Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles

#34

Post by ugh »

mikeryan wrote: post #17
blhack wrote: post #15

They'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.

"At the point where the page would get split, just put an ad." Most pages have more then one ad (header, sidebar etc) so its not as simple as that. Also, like it or not, page views are the unofficial "Nielsens" for websites, the more page views the more popular you are when you're pitching your ad offering.

Is that still true? I think advertisers everywhere are realising that page views are a pretty worthless measure. Just my own narrow perspective: I have been reading all the major ad business magazines in Germany lately, and there, everybody seems to be eager to ditch page views in favour of length of stay, visits, unique users and the like. Everybody feels betrayed by everybody's use of page views.

Re: Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles

#36

Post by mikeryan »

ugh wrote: post #34
mikeryan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"At the point where the page would get split, just put an ad." Most pages have more then one ad (header, sidebar etc) so its not as simple as that. Also, like it or not, page views are the unofficial "Nielsens" for websites, the more page views the more popular you are when you're pitching your ad offering.

Is that still true? I think advertisers everywhere are realising that page views are a pretty worthless measure. Just my own narrow perspective: I have been reading all the major ad business magazines in Germany lately, and there, everybody seems to be eager to ditch page views in favour of length of stay, visits, unique users and the like. Everybody feels betrayed by everybody's use of page views.

There's argument whether its the best way to do it but CPM is still the standard for selling ad space and that's based on page views.

Re: Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles

#37

Post by blasdel »

blhack wrote: post #15

They'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.

Adsense's TOS state: "Up to three ad units and three link units may be placed on each page"

I imagine other worthwhile networks have similar policies.

Re: Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles

#38

Post by blasdel »

fallintothis wrote: post #33
jrockway wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, why does the URL need to be human-readable? URLs are for computers. The content is for the human. Disagreed. I can't stand sites with ugly, incomprehensible URLs: even if they're just appending parameters ad infinitum, it's unnecessary drag on the process of editing, sharing, and typing the URL. E.g., something like http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Books/b/ref=sa_menu_kbo0/187-1539918-5044028?_enc oding=UTF8&node=1…

The context of a hyperlink is meaningful, but the text of the corresponding URL is of little relevance.

'Clean' URLs tend to be a REST anti-pattern, as they are tied up with the notion that the ability to edit an known URL to refer to a different resource constitutes an API, much less a REST-ful one. HATEOAS Motherfuckers!

Re: Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles

#39

Post by pbhjpbhj »

jrwoodruff wrote: post #22
cobralibre wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Given the vast differences in reading speeds though there's no way to be sure that someone read all the way through a page if it's one page and they spent half an hour there - they might have been looking out the window. Whilst if they clicked through 1-2-3-4 then you can be pretty sure they at least skimmed each page.
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