A popular blog truncated its RSS feeds to boost site pageviews. It’s like last week, when The Atlantic changed to partial-content RSS feeds. And that was like every other week, when some publisher did something that some readers didn’t like to make a few more cents.
I dislike the intrusive…
Well-reasoned post from Marco that says much of what I think about pagination of longer articles on the web. The one site that really got to me was Slate, since the second page of many articles was a single paragraph, but Slate at least offers a link for a single page view. That one annoyance, which I did complain about, has in fact caused me to read fewer articles on Slate, and it changed my reading habits there. Now when I open an article the first thing I do is scroll down to the bottom of the page to find out if the article has been broken up, and then I scroll back up and click the link for single page view. There’s a link at the bottom of the page too, but that link sends you to the anchor for the top of the second page, which I find just as annoying. The “single page” link at the top of the page, though, is also annoying because it’s always there, whether the article spans multiple pages or not. The NYT has a similar setup, but their UI only displays the “single page” link when the article spans multiple pages, and once you click on it to get the longer view, the link is absent from the resulting page.
I know they’ve probably got some numbers to back their annoyance, but my willingness to deal with it is pretty low in general and depends on how much I value the content and how intrusive the ads are. But I’m with Marco - nobody owes me anything, and I’m willing to vote with my page views.
