Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles | Hacker News Reader

Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles

marco.org

156 pointsslater42 comments

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...

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.

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

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?

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. :)

Wow, that's amazingly useful for google results. Now I have to go back to Firefox, from Chrome.

http://www.evanwondrasek.com/post/143027043/autopager-enable...

I like it too but liked it more when I turned off the spam it adds to google results

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.

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?

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.

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

> For example, I believe there is an antiquated and probably flawed notion out there that readers dislike really long pages

To be honest, I do dislike really long pages. I tend to read longer articles piecewise. Read a bit, do something else, read some more, do something else, etc. Long pages usually have very little points where I can anchor my memory. All paragraphs look alike and I have to read several paragraphs before I've found the point where I stopped reading. That's highly distracting. I prefer pages for long articles.

The main purpose of this is not to inflate page view statistics, as such, but to increase the available 'ad inventory'. By making users click, you are able to refresh the page and serve a new ad.

...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.

Have you thought about whether removing the pagination would cause an even high percentage of your readers to read the full article?

And if the percentage who click to page two is in fact so large, have you considered how much more satisfied those same visitors would be if you removed an obstacle that so many of them confront every time they read an article?

By default we do not paginate, but sometimes I think it makes sense. Personally, I don't like the way it looks when there is very long text on a single page. All the navigation links at the top and sides are scrolled way off the screen and the user is adrift in sea of text. (I admit part of this is a limitation in our design. Perhaps all the blocks of HTML in the sidebar should repeat for the full length of the page?)

I'd be very interested in testing paginate/non-paginate, but I'm not sure there's in easy way to measure "satisfaction." Perhaps a javascript hack that detects if they've scrolled to the bottom of the page?

I don't think headers scrolling off the screen is a significant problem for anyone; all you need do is hit the HOME button and you're right back at the top.

Actually, a bigger problem is wanting to follow a link in the middle of a long story after you finished the story. Maybe people should copy links that appear within a story at the top or bottom of the page so a reader doesn't have to go scrolling back through the story to find it again.

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?

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

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

If they jam pack the page with ads then the page will load slower and probably be unacceptable in terms of page response time.

Adsense's TOS state: "Up to three ad units and three link units may be placed on each page"

I imagine other worthwhile networks have similar policies.

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.

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

http://www.flickr.com/photos/merlin/sets/72157622077100537/d...

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

I'm guessing it's not the brevity of the URL that bothers you. Is it the numerical identifier? What should it be instead?

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

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

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