Yes: Breaking Web Articles Into Multiple Pages Is A Pain
from the stop-it dept
I made this same basic argument almost seven years ago, but it seems that many news websites still think it's a good idea to break up stories into multiple pages. Farhad Manjoo, over at Slate, has an article arguing why paginating long articles is a bad idea, whose only purpose is to goose page view numbers and ad views for websites -- and it does nothing to make the reading experience better. Somewhat ironically, he's writing this on Slate, which does paginate stories. At least Slate has a "single page" option, which is what I linked to above, though you can look at the idiotically broken up version if you'd like as well.From my standpoint, sites that do excessive pagination -- especially if they have no "single page" option -- are automatically less interesting to me. I find Forbes to be one of the worst here. While I think the site has some good reporting, I will often look for alternative sources to link to stories, because I don't want to send users to a page where they'll have to click five times just to read a single story. To me, this makes Forbes look really bad: like it knows it has to trick readers to get page views, rather than trusting its content. If Forbes doesn't trust its own content, why should I?
Thankfully, Manjoo points out that some newer, more innovative sites -- such as Buzzfeed and The Verge (both of which are immensely popular) -- have decided that breaking up stories into multiple pages just doesn't make any sense:
In other words, what I suspected seems to be true for those sites. If you trust your content, and trust your readers -- and want them to share your content -- you don't break up your stories in annoying ways. You make it easier for your readers to consume and share your content. Hopefully other sites will begin to realize this, though considering how long we've been discussing this, I doubt it.I asked Joshua Topolsky, the Verge’s editor, whether he had a hard time convincing the advertising sales department at the magazine to ditch pages. He said he didn’t: “From the beginning, there's been a company-wide belief that we can marry great advertising with great content and not have to cheat or trick our users,” Topolsky emailed. “And so far, that's proven 100 percent correct. Our traffic has been on a big climb, and I believe advertisers are really beginning to see the true value in engaged users who care (and return) versus sheer volume of pageviews (though our pageviews have also been through the roof).”
Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s founder, echoed this sentiment. BuzzFeed publishes dozens of photo galleries daily, and lately it’s been getting into longform reporting, too. (See Doree Shafrir’s 7,000-word piece on nightmares.) If it paginated, it could boost its pageviews significantly. But it has never paginated, and Peretti suspects the site never will. (Even BuzzFeed’s homepage isn’t paginated—it keeps loading older stories as you scroll.) BuzzFeed can afford to run stories in full because its advertising model—which relies more on “branded content” and not banner ads—doesn’t rely on pageviews. For Peretti, the most important metric for a story is how many unique people click on it, and how widely it’s shared. He says: “If you build things that people are excited about sharing with their friends—if you build things that don’t annoy people and if it’s presented in a user-friendly way—then, long-term, people will share content more, new people will come and check out what you’re doing, people will have more positive feelings about you, and … OK, maybe it’s a little bit utopian of a view, but it’s working for us.”
For the most part, it really does seem that those who go for pagination seem to come from more old school media businesses -- and perhaps that's not surprising. They look at things through older metrics, such as how many page views, rather than metrics like how many people share your content. On top of that, I find the arguments "in favor" of pagination, questionable. Manjoo asked Slate why it paginates the articles, and was told that readers like it better that way.
“Pages that run too long can irritate readers,” Plotz said in an email. “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.” An editor at another site made a further point that pagination can be a useful signal to readers about the length of an article—if you see an article with 10 pages, you know to set aside a lot of time to read it (or skip it).Depress a reader? Really? I recognize that there's TL;DR syndrome, but that would apply to long articles whether they're paginated or not. Also, the idea that the number of pages is a "symbol" ignores that we've already got this magic thing called... scrollbars, which effectively do the same thing.
The whole thing just seems like a rationalization for trying to boost pageviews by annoying readers, and that doesn't seem like a good long term strategy.
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Filed Under: news articles, pages, pagination, reader friendly, websites
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More irony than idiocy
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The best uses of page breaks I have seen is on sites that do hardware reviews. Using 1 page to handle each area of the review, and letting people know what is on each page is very useful. Yes, they could load the whole thing on me in one shot, but that might not be very efficient for either of us.
One site that annoys me endlessly with page breaks is your good buddy Chris Anderson's Wired site. They are ANNOYING with their page breaks, especially in mobile. For the longest time, the "view full story" page in mobile would break the mobile site and give you the full regular site as the only option to see the full page, which was truly not a good idea.
The squeeze for page views is there. I know you don't like the CPM model, but it's here to stay for the forseeable future. Further, because Google tends to use things like page views and bounce rate to decide if a website is good or bad, many sites are working to shove stuff onto second and third pages just to appease the gods of Google, rather than the visitors to the site, because they want the new visitors from Google every day.
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The ability to jump to a subset of information that is personally relevant without having to scroll-and-peek through a large page usually tends to outweigh the annoyance of having to hit next page if reading through serially.
Even in sufficiently large flow content, pagination would make sense if it were approached like "chapterisation".
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I might have to patent a "method for allowing a user to move in nonlinear fashion between elements of a document or documents containing one or more topics of related or unrelated content on the internet"
:-)
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But over-excessive breaking (MSN anybody?) and advertisements that cut into blocks of text, those need to be added to the Internet Code of.... Good Design's "What NOT to do, or face our wrath."
Now, one shouldn't confuse page-breaks, with summarizing. There is nothing wrong with taking a few FULL lines, with the majority of the article on click. But that works best with websites that aren't dedicated to information.
To summarize: Every time you break the page, you risk a punch from the rage.
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Umm, space bar to page down?
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HTML is text, which takes very little time to load.
It's all the ads that the page author loads before the text that kills your experience.
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There are sites I've given up on due to broken articles.
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As usual, that's actually the secret. Actually cede some control to the reader/customer and they'll be happier. Many wouldn't use anything but the default option, but then the formatting becomes less of an issue with those who do find it annoying. It might take some work on some sites, but that's better than losing readers.
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Non issue
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Ads can be too intrusive
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"Apple no longer sells Innovation, only Incremental-ism", so why shouldn't articles on it be incremental
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Estimated reading times
I also like how their two "justifications" fight each: a long scroll bar is scary and intimidating and puts people off, but a high page count is a useful indicator of the reading time needed...
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If it's not page breaks, it's your RSS feed.
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Re: If it's not page breaks, it's your RSS feed.
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Bettter would be a good progresive load.with any in view images given priority in the loading. Image ares should be pre-defined in size, so that the page does not reorganise as each image loads and move what is being read at the time.
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It was never for the reader, but sites who can't sell anything but ads, and yes, it's because they don't trust their content to get viewers.
Math is a skill many people don't lack. To them, "10 pages + 1 person = 10 ad views" because "100 people + 1 page = 100 ad views" doesn't register as being more profitable.
What's stellar here is the exact same concept is used in our entertainment, which is why I disagree, mostly, "ad=content".
When content is broken for content, it's annoying, and it doesn't matter how "entertaining" the interruption is.
"Next" is the web's equivalent of the DVD unskippable preview, and look how long it's taking Hollywood to stop using it.
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One of these days, TD will get with the times and give is commentators an edit button.
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Frustrated... much ? :D
To me, being able to navigate through long content matters. A long page you only get to scroll down an up is a pain in the ass. Split pages or not, usability is in the execution.
What REALLY pisses me off is the recent and fast-rising tendency of sites to welcome you with a layed-over video add for every fucking article you open up, like Wired does now. And (i don't even mention YouTube pre-content ads....). It feels like going backwards into the early web of 90s when advertisment was devised by web-illiterate Comm agencies... coming from WIRED ???? What the fuck is happening ????
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Re: Frustrated... much ? :D
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Almighty scrollbars!
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i'm a pure drain on your website and revenue
whats worse, piracy or adblock? is adblock piracy?
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Cool. I use noscript myself. The sidebar video ads tend to be distracting.
i'm a pure drain on your website and revenue
How so? You are still reading the articles and with your comment you have actually contributed content.
Perhaps Techdirt isn't really the right place to try and score a point on this one. Mike has always maintained that Techdirt is really more or less a loss leader for his consultation business. Besides driving interest to his main business upfront, it also serves to build and maintain Mike's credibility, which also generates more business for him.
whats worse, piracy or adblock? is adblock piracy?
No, adblock is not piracy. It's no different than using the bathroom during broadcast TV commercials or changing the radio station when the song ends.
As for what is worse, that is an apples to airplanes comparison, so it really cannot be answered.
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but blogs who solely rely on ads would be negatively affected
not everyone has a consulting business some writers/bloggers just want to present what they write and make money off ads
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I blame Steve Krug
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Anyone else just click the Print button?
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Just use a browser plugin
Does it bother me? Not since I installed a browser extension to automatically depaginate articles. If anyone uses Chrome, AutoPagerize is a good extension for this.
Should I have to install a browser plugin to get around stupid website design? Well, no, but that's another issue.
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Visual vs. semantic formatting
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"Page"?
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Ad Block Plus is your friend...
(and Ghostery and NoScript, but ABP is a good start to stopping The They (tm) from taking over your machine, your experiences of the webiverse...
art guerrilla
aka ann archy
eof
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Make the customer happy
If you have happy customers, you will have profits. If you annoy them, they'll go elsewhere.
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One nitpick
What about next year though? When these autoload JS scripts and thier back-end partners start to become more intelligent about loading only partial articles? At that point, the scroll bar becomes meaningless and might as well be removed from the window.
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Page Breaks and scroll bar
This can be true if comments don't also load under the story. I have seen scroll bars that are almost non existent due to 500+ comments under a short story.
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Re: Page Breaks and scroll bar
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Not just annoying...
The web has removed the necessity of that manner of writing, but pagination works (kind of) to put that back in. The important stuff can still be at the beginning - where people will read it - and the unimportant stuff can be at the end - where people won't.
It's manipulative more than anything else, and not just for page views. It means you can make all sorts of claims/assertions/theses at the top while effectively leaving out contradictions by shoving them on the sixth page in the hopes no one bothers to go that far.
For some it's probably about advertising dollars, but for others it is almost certainly just as much about being able to 'get away with' slanting your reporting, if only to stick the talking points for the headline-only readers of today.
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