Jim Lynch: Off the Top of My Head…

Somebody posted a note on a site I frequent yesterday complaining about articles being broken up into too many pages. The point this person was making was that he/she found it annoying and/or thought that web publishers were being greedy or just otherwise trying to annoy readers.

Well why do sites break up articles into multiple pages? Well it’s simple really. Money.

What is the business model of most web publishers? A few like the Wall Street Journal charge a subscription but most can’t get away with doing that or are simply afraid to try. And so advertising is how they generate revenue. Breaking articles into multiple pages lends itself to generating a revenue stream for the site by creating inventory for ads to be served on.

If you aren’t familiar with how web advertising works then go and read this this article. There’s quite a bit there but it will give you a good overview and will help explain some of the reasons why publishers do what they do.

The guy who was complaining about having to click too much is basically an anti-clicker. He wants all of his content on one page and without having to click. This, unfortunately, conflicts with his reader nemesis the anti-scroller. If an article was really long and required a lot of scrolling then you’d have the anti-scrollers complaining that they’d rather click and not have to scroll.

Between the business needs of the site and the conflict between anti-scrollers and anti-clickers, publishers really can’t win.

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