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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
12-19-2009 @ 5:04AM
agnoster said...
@Mike:
*cough* I like wow.com and all, but isn't this a bit disingenuous? Every news outlet that breaks up articles into multiple pages is doing it for the same reason - page views -> ad revenue. It's not easier to read an article by clicking through multiple links than simply scrolling - this is a misconception from printed media, where it would probably be unwieldy to work with a huge long scroll rather than turn some pages. On the internet, that is not the case. Each extra page means locating a link to click, waiting for the next page to load, scrolling back past whatever's at the top - and god help you if you opened the article on your computer before going somewhere without internet. There are exceptional cases where you might want to break up the content a bit (I imagine War and Peace would not work best on one page) but... for inspiration, look at Wikipedia. Each topic is one page, you don't have to click through to get to the next "page" of the article on... oh, say, Stonehenge. (If Wikipedia ran off ad revenue, it might look different, of course.)
If you don't believe me, try a survey: "Would you prefer long articles broken up into several pages, or all on one page?" I'm fairly confident it would be a landslide in favor of one page, but I'm obviously willing to be proven wrong by empirical evidence.
It's the same reason your RSS feeds only contain a teaser, so that you have to hop to the actual website to read what's "below the fold" (by the way, this is the internet - there is no "fold").
Now, it's not wrong to try to make money off a blog, not at all. I delight in reading your content, I support you guys making a living off it, but please - treat us like adults, okay? You shouldn't be ashamed that you've made decisions that improve your revenue - but you might have cause to be ashamed if you need to lie about it to us :-P