

Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles - slater
http://www.marco.org/237630497

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tvon
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...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-
os-x-10-6.ars)

~~~
gr366
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.

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akamaka
This was an annoyance for me, until I started using AutoPager.

If you use Firefox, I highly recommend it: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/4925>

~~~
Torn
How does AutoPager work with sites (such as certain hardware review ones)
which paginate content above the fold? I.e. how can it tell when I've finished
reading and need to page?

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
AutoPager does an optimistic pre-fetch of extra content, meaning that while
you're reading page 1, it's loading page 2; once you hit page 2 content, it
begins fetching page 3, etc. It's likely a bit more complex than that, but
ideally, with AutoPager in effect, you shouldn't ever realize you stopped
reading page 1. :)

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SlyShy
This has been said before, but bears repeating. I like reading articles on
Google News more than on most "non-aggregator" news sites just because Google
News makes the news readable. What a lot of content creators don't seem to
understand is, I don't care where the content comes from if it's a pain to
read it.

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jriddycuz
I'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?

~~~
eli
I don't see how this is "artificial." If you read a two page article, then you
viewed two pages. And if the design is so hideous that you don't click to view
the second page, well then the number of page views isn't inflated at all.

~~~
mikeryan
The page view isn't "artificial" the need to have a second page (as opposed to
one long page) is.

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eli
_...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.

~~~
cobralibre
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?

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jrwoodruff
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

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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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blhack
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.

~~~
mikeryan
"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.

~~~
ugh
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.

~~~
mikeryan
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.

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NathanKP
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.

~~~
pronoiac
See also, Merlin Mann's "Noise-to-Noise Ratio" series:

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/merlin/sets/72157622077100537/d...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/merlin/sets/72157622077100537/detail/)

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invisible
I have always wondered how they can charge per page view for ads yet the
advertisers be OK with this practice. Apparently they just turn a deaf ear to
this problem and the consumer/reader suffers. You'd think they'd realize that
if the person didn't click the ad the first time, they're likely not going to
click it on the next page.

~~~
eli
Well, it's still two impressions. And if the second page has different ads
then you have a new chance to click on one.

Also, some advertisers are interested in brand awareness; they don't care much
about whether you click, they just want you to see their logo as many times as
possible.

And look at it this way: if you have a long page of content, your ad is gone
once the user scrolls down. If you have several short screens, your ad stays
in view much longer.

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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?

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Portnull
Pagination breaks my articles in Instapaper, making it even more horrible:
start reading an article on the train only to realize there's no page 2.

~~~
m_eiman
Fortunately most sites have a "print" view of their articles that puts it all
in a single page that works fine with InstaPaper.

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petercooper
It doesn't bother me at all unless each page is < 500 words or something. A
giant slab of text turns me off.. too long to read, etc. Cut into bite size
portions of a minute or two each, it seems more readable, even if it's really
more annoying.

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joe_the_user
A 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...

~~~
billswift
On the internet very little content is really worth working to get. If it's
too annoying to read it, there's always other pages available. And if it is
worth working to get, I, at least, am not likely to be paying much attention
to the ads around it.

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teye
You have no room to be picky about pagination if your URLs look like that.

~~~
jrockway
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.

~~~
fallintothis
_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.

~~~
blasdel
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!_

------
sutro
Dear Every Blogger Whose Post Title Starts with the Word "Dear":

Find a new linkbait gimmick. This one's played out.

