What is the cost to produce a page like this? Must be high, versus the cost of a normal article with inline images. I cannot imagine that the ROI is worth it. Therefore I think that this article format will disappear for economic reasons.
It had over 3.5 Million page views the first week. Estimates are that it took about three man-months to write and design the long article. But that was two years ago, and without any of the tools and experience they have now.
That's expensive, but napkin-calculations can be done:
Average yearly at NY Times according to Google is: $98 167 That means about $33 000 plus some taxes and costs for three monte, say, $50 000 then.
Can you sell one ad space in such an article at $50 000 / 3 500 000 = $14.29 per 1k impression?
NY Times sells ads at $6.29 for 1k impression on their sports pages. On the Snow Fall article three such ads would be enough to cover the estimated costs.
As a comparative note: A full page print ad costs $10 per estimated reader, it is possible that this Norway article is also published in the regular print, and will therefore recuperate some costs there as well.
http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/ http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/two-gunshots/ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/15/magazine/bad-p... http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/gun-country/ http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/the-jockey/ http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/tomato-can-blues/
To keep the analogy, NY-times is doing web-page stories Broadway-style. Perhaps they found an unexplored marked, perhaps it is too soon. But sooner or later, the art-form of story telling on the web is going to be taken to the next level done by professionals for a lot more money than any amateurs telling the same story.
In fact, I'm betting on it by trying to find a market for being the creator of things like this. I haven't gotten started yet, but it's at the top of my 'business opportunities' list. I think I mostly just need to find someone who is good at visualizing data, or dive into that myself.