Is there a point to paginating articles online?

Obviously ads. Generally I prefer single page (+ Readability), but was surprised that sometimes I prefer multiple pages. I think it's when they act a bit like chapters, giving you a sense of completion. Maybe it's when the content is dense and/or boring. It also makes it easier to "hold your place", if you need to do something else (like research something in the article). I'm one of those people who highlights text to keep my place on the page (so I have to adblock some sites' JS that hijacks highlighting (e.g. NYTimes)).

I once worked on a redesign for a site, and one of the sections I worked on was the "photo gallery" section. I had a beautiful JavaScript-based photo gallery which had nice transitions between photos, it was pretty slick and nice and fast. It even degraded to full page-loads if you didn't have JavaScript enabled.<p>In the end, I had to take out my beautiful JavaScript-based gallery and present the "degraded" experience all the time because after it went live, pageviews dropped "dramatically" and the ad people didn't like that.<p>In retrospect, I probably could've just refreshed the ads via JavaScript when I transitioned to a different photo, but the potential drop in ad revenue meant I was having to work quickly...

Just a heads-up for any Chrome users out there who aren't aware; AutoPatchWork does wonders for eliminating the annoyance of pagination...<p><a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/aeolcjbaammbkgaiagooljfdepnjmkfd" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/aeolcjbaammbkgaiag...</a>

I worked as a contract developer for a media website for a couple years. The top priority in all decisions was how to increase ad revenue, since this was their one source of income. If it was a choice of usability or page views taking precedence, page views would win every time.<p>Increasing page views (like mentioned in this article) was important to them because:<p>1) It increased the opportunity to feed ads and generate more revenue.<p>2) Part of their valuation was based on page views, so if they were to be acquired, this improved their valuation.<p>Unfortunately, usability was often hurt in the process.

Ads or not, I just can't stomach reading long non-paginated articles on mobile. Safari mobile rarely keeps view-state when I come back. Without a decent scroll mechanism, it's a lot of finger flicking to try to remember where I was when reading a long article. Pagination lets me bookmark where I left off on longer articles.

I've found that especially in Mobile browsing, the pagination ends up offering little advantage to anyone, beyond statistics. Mobile versions of news sites will often not have ads, only a small header, the text and the pagination links, so I'm not sure why they would continue to use the technique.<p>On top of this, I find it very irritating when reading a paginated news article that split to a new page right smack in the middle of a sentence. And it's happened more often than I'd care to remember.

Not from a readers perspective. It's annoying.

It would be better if the IAB et al used uniques + time-on-site, rather than raw pageviews/impressions. Most medium-to-high-traffic sites have effectively infinite inventory, and some portion of that almost always gets sold as remainder.<p>For pagination, why not count a scroll-down (and thus viewing of an extra ad further down the page?) as a pageview? Or, again, time-on-site or time-on-page or something that better reflects user attention.

From a user interface perspective, paging has one great benefit. It provides structure, especially to long texts with no images or layout cues. Think of it as an extended version of the paragraph: a tool of composition that gives readers subtle navigation cues within a text.<p>If paging means more load time, bad results in search or the like, that's obviously a bad thing.

What are the user click results of displaying the pagination as shown with the "Full story" option?<p>Maybe this is one of those things where the obvious answer isn't what users actually do or prefer for some reason.

This reminds me of the "life below 600 px" story from last week [1]. So yes, there is a reason to do multi-page content from that point of view.<p>Unfortunately, it's used as a cheap trick to smear limited content over pages that are riddled with ads. I hope the folks who promote this realise they're making visitors become immune to ads. Anyone remember that television layout from "Idiocracy"?<p>[1] <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3242670" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3242670</a><p>edit:link

The only reason is to inspire people to write Readability and similar addons. And another reason is to inspire people to create adtrash-free sites.

I worked on the redesign of a business news site and there were a fair number of vocal readers who really preferred paginating long articles.<p>Maybe it would be different today since everyone is using fixed headers and footers and sidebars that follow you, but if those aren't present it kinda sucks for the reader to get to the bottom of a long page and having to scroll way back up to find a nav bar.

Yes, you can link directly to a set of results. And if you go the route of sites like Kickstarter that automagically update the URL as you scroll, you still avoid having to load unintended content when you reload it for that set of results.

If you click full story or next page, it allows the site to know how much you read.

google encourages pagination with their 3 ads/page limit. seems like the limit should be based on quantity of content, not a per page metric.

Does CPC increase with pagination or only CPI? Why are advertisers still buying on CPI and not CPC?

More page views.