Following on from the article I wrote a few weeks ago about How To: Remove "0 comments" from Blogger and why this might help your Blogger statistics. Today I'm going to share an article I read the other day about why pagination is one of the worst design and usability sins on the web and how simple single-page articles are the preferred choice by internet readers.
I have always been of the opinion that articles that have to span across two or more pages which might resemble Leo Tolstoy's book about War and Peace are only written that way because in theory they yield more opportunities to display ads.
This post was originally published on theage.com.au.
Farhad Manjoo
Why splitting news articles into multiple pages is evil.
Slate magazine's editorial guidelines call for articles to be split into multiple pages once they hit the 1000-word mark.
So as a writer for this publication, I have to keep it brief: splitting articles and photo galleries into multiple pages is evil. It should stop.
Pagination is one of the worst design and usability sins on the web — the kind of obvious no-no that should have gone out with blinky text, dancing cat animations and autoplaying music. It shows constant, quiet contempt for people who should be any news site's highest priority — folks who want to read articles all the way to the end.
Pagination persists because splitting a single-page article into two pages can, in theory, yield twice as many opportunities to display ads, although in practice it doesn't because lots of readers never bother to click past the first page. [The Age keeps its content on single pages].
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The practice has become so ubiquitous that it's numbed many publications and readers into thinking that multipage design is how the web has always been, and how it should be.
Neither is true: the web's earliest news sites didn't paginate, and the practice grew up only over the past decade, in response to pressure from the ad industry.
It doesn't have to be this way. Some of the web's most forward-thinking and successful publications, including BuzzFeed and the Verge, have eschewed pagination, and they're better off for it.
So would we all be: pageview juicing is a myopic strategy. In the long-run, unfriendly design isn't going to help websites win new adherents, and winning new readers is the whole point of being a website. I bet that if all news sites switched to single-page articles — and BuzzFeed-style scrolling galleries instead of multipage slideshows — they'd experience short-term pain followed by long-term gain. Their articles would get shared more widely and, thus, win more loyal, regular visitors for the publication.
I know you're ready to call this a First World problem. But it's still a problem — one that affects you, dear reader of the web, every time you click on a story or gallery to learn about Third World problems.
But if they victimise you often enough, you develop a kind of learned-helplessness that makes them seem less terrible.
That's exactly what has happened with pagination. Every day at countless news sites, I and tens of millions of innocent readers click on articles that turn out to be mere fractions of articles. Pieces that should be readable on a single scroll require one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine or more page clicks.
We all have our little routines for dealing with this proliferation of pages. The timid among us just go with the flow — we click, click and click some more, wasting time and bandwidth to feed advertisers their precious pages.
The savvy know about ways to get around the clicks — when I'm presented with a many-page piece, I immediately search for the site's single-page button. For sites I visit often, my fingers have committed the location of the single-page button to muscle memory; I click to see the article, and then, almost automatically, click again to see the whole thing.
And when I realise a site doesn't have a single-page view, I make a mental note to spit on my hand the next time I meet that site's web designer.
I think that thoughtful design can improve how long articles look on the web. One example of this is the Verge, which publishes very long pieces every day and makes them look stunning and manageable without page breaks. In its long pieces, the Verge breaks up blocks of text with photos and design elements like pull-quotes, and each article has internal navigation buttons that let you go to specific sections of the piece. (In a review of the new Kindle, for instance, you can click on "Hardware" or "Software, battery" to scroll directly to those topics.)
I asked Joshua Topolsky, the Verge's editor, whether he had a hard time convincing the advertising sales department at the magazine to ditch pages. He said he didn't: "From the beginning, there's been a company-wide belief that we can marry great advertising with great content and not have to cheat or trick our users," Topolsky emailed. "And so far, that's proven 100 per cent correct. Our traffic has been on a big climb, and I believe advertisers are really beginning to see the true value in engaged users who care (and return) versus sheer volume of pageviews (though our pageviews have also been through the roof)."
Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed's founder, echoed this sentiment. For Peretti, the most important metric for a story is how many unique people click on it, and how widely it's shared. He says: "If you build things that people are excited about sharing with their friends — if you build things that don't annoy people and if it's presented in a user-friendly way — then, long-term, people will share content more, new people will come and check out what you're doing, people will have more positive feelings about you ... Maybe it's a little bit utopian of a view, but it's working for us."
I believe that's right. At the very least, it sounds worth trying. I could go on about this for pages, but I'm already past my one-page limit.
It is true that in the early days (perhaps due to the speed of the internet) pagination didn't exists and it wasn't until Google brought our Google Ads that the single-page trend was broken. Perhaps in order to sell more advertising space...!!! Today however, the most important metric of an articles popularity is the amount of unique clicks it receives and how widely it is shared throughout social media.
This post was originally published on theage.com.au.
Farhad Manjoo
Why splitting news articles into multiple pages is evil.
Slate magazine's editorial guidelines call for articles to be split into multiple pages once they hit the 1000-word mark.
So as a writer for this publication, I have to keep it brief: splitting articles and photo galleries into multiple pages is evil. It should stop.
Pagination is one of the worst design and usability sins on the web — the kind of obvious no-no that should have gone out with blinky text, dancing cat animations and autoplaying music. It shows constant, quiet contempt for people who should be any news site's highest priority — folks who want to read articles all the way to the end.
Pagination persists because splitting a single-page article into two pages can, in theory, yield twice as many opportunities to display ads, although in practice it doesn't because lots of readers never bother to click past the first page. [The Age keeps its content on single pages].
Advertisement
The practice has become so ubiquitous that it's numbed many publications and readers into thinking that multipage design is how the web has always been, and how it should be.
Neither is true: the web's earliest news sites didn't paginate, and the practice grew up only over the past decade, in response to pressure from the ad industry.
It doesn't have to be this way. Some of the web's most forward-thinking and successful publications, including BuzzFeed and the Verge, have eschewed pagination, and they're better off for it.
So would we all be: pageview juicing is a myopic strategy. In the long-run, unfriendly design isn't going to help websites win new adherents, and winning new readers is the whole point of being a website. I bet that if all news sites switched to single-page articles — and BuzzFeed-style scrolling galleries instead of multipage slideshows — they'd experience short-term pain followed by long-term gain. Their articles would get shared more widely and, thus, win more loyal, regular visitors for the publication.
I know you're ready to call this a First World problem. But it's still a problem — one that affects you, dear reader of the web, every time you click on a story or gallery to learn about Third World problems.
But if they victimise you often enough, you develop a kind of learned-helplessness that makes them seem less terrible.
That's exactly what has happened with pagination. Every day at countless news sites, I and tens of millions of innocent readers click on articles that turn out to be mere fractions of articles. Pieces that should be readable on a single scroll require one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine or more page clicks.
We all have our little routines for dealing with this proliferation of pages. The timid among us just go with the flow — we click, click and click some more, wasting time and bandwidth to feed advertisers their precious pages.
The savvy know about ways to get around the clicks — when I'm presented with a many-page piece, I immediately search for the site's single-page button. For sites I visit often, my fingers have committed the location of the single-page button to muscle memory; I click to see the article, and then, almost automatically, click again to see the whole thing.
And when I realise a site doesn't have a single-page view, I make a mental note to spit on my hand the next time I meet that site's web designer.
I think that thoughtful design can improve how long articles look on the web. One example of this is the Verge, which publishes very long pieces every day and makes them look stunning and manageable without page breaks. In its long pieces, the Verge breaks up blocks of text with photos and design elements like pull-quotes, and each article has internal navigation buttons that let you go to specific sections of the piece. (In a review of the new Kindle, for instance, you can click on "Hardware" or "Software, battery" to scroll directly to those topics.)
I asked Joshua Topolsky, the Verge's editor, whether he had a hard time convincing the advertising sales department at the magazine to ditch pages. He said he didn't: "From the beginning, there's been a company-wide belief that we can marry great advertising with great content and not have to cheat or trick our users," Topolsky emailed. "And so far, that's proven 100 per cent correct. Our traffic has been on a big climb, and I believe advertisers are really beginning to see the true value in engaged users who care (and return) versus sheer volume of pageviews (though our pageviews have also been through the roof)."
Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed's founder, echoed this sentiment. For Peretti, the most important metric for a story is how many unique people click on it, and how widely it's shared. He says: "If you build things that people are excited about sharing with their friends — if you build things that don't annoy people and if it's presented in a user-friendly way — then, long-term, people will share content more, new people will come and check out what you're doing, people will have more positive feelings about you ... Maybe it's a little bit utopian of a view, but it's working for us."
I believe that's right. At the very least, it sounds worth trying. I could go on about this for pages, but I'm already past my one-page limit.
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