this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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Why do some websites have a "Continue Reading" button? (lemmy.ca)
submitted 9 months ago by canadaduane@lemmy.ca to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
39 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Some article websites (I'm looking at msn.com right now, as an example) show the first page or so of article content and then have a "Continue Reading" button, which you must click to see the rest of the article. This seems so ridiculous, from a UX perspective--I know how to scroll down to continue reading, so why hide the text and make me click a button, then have me scroll? Why has this become a fairly common practice?

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[–] ArgentRaven@lemmy.world 128 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It's two fold:

  1. it's good proof of "user interaction with site" to sell to advertisers

  2. they can use that to load more ads or refresh current ones after it loads more text, and you're already bought in on the story so you're likely going to keep going.

I suspect a third reason is to try adding other news stories at the end in case the current one didn't grab your attention, but that doesn't seem to be as consistent amongst sites that I've seen do this. I run ad blockers though, so I don't really see the sites the way they expect me to.

[–] Thcdenton@lemmy.world 51 points 9 months ago

Enshittification

[–] Snapz@lemmy.world 48 points 9 months ago

Because fuck you, that's why.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 44 points 9 months ago (1 children)

My guess is that this gives them data they can analyze on how many people actually read the page that far.

[–] FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 25 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It also generated clicks so they can charge advertisers more for views.

[–] fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That's... not how that works

[–] FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That’s exactly how that works.

Increased traffic to your website increases the value of ad space on that website and they pay you more for it; the “read more” button is one tool to demonstrate MSN or whoever actually has traffic.

It’s far from the only tool, but it is one tool, and is part of the analytics they’re running. It also shows some amount of engagement, that people are actually readin the article rather than clicking on it and forgetting about.

[–] 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I mean the best way to increase the value of your ad space is to have a small but visible amount and to produce content good enough that advertisers come to you, rather than the other way around

The issue there is that it takes effort to produce good content and it's easier to just paraphrase existing/ai generate new content, which results in a "read more" button (unrelated to a "enter your email to read more" option which is 100% for advertising as a replacement for 3rd party cookies, and allows for users to see and decide exactly what websites to share their identity with as an active decision, rather than shadier stuff behind the scenes like cookies or fingerprinting where they're tracking you without you even knowing, so expect to see a lot more of it as they go away)

[–] FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

And why does good content cause advertisers to come to you?

Traffic. The more people come through your site, the more valuable the ad-space, the more they’re willing to pay.

Good content in niche areas will also increase value, yes, but there’s a reason websites pay for SEO services…

[–] 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 9 months ago

Yes, but not as exclusively as you might think. There's an increasing number of manually vetted "premium" sites (for better or worse, as it reduces SEO spam while also making it harder for good but niche content to break through) which provide actually good content, as irritated people looking for a sentence in a multipage article aren't going to look kindly on ads, whereas engaged people reading good content will

[–] BustinJiber@lemmy.world 24 points 9 months ago

Then you click it, and it's like 2 sentences and the rest is ads. Might be one of the reasons.

[–] Spzi@lemm.ee 17 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Just a guess: to prevent bots from scraping the full content?

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Doubt it. My web analytics indicate that bots click on every single element on the page, whether it makes sense or not.

For this reason it's a good idea not to allow your site to generate any kind of circular self-referential loop that can be achieved via navigation or clicking on things, because poorly coded bots will not realize that they're driving themselves around in circles and proceed to bombard your server with zillions of requests per second for the same thing over and over again.

Likewise, if you have any user initiated action that can generate an arbitrary result set like for example adding an item or set of items to a quote or cart, it is imperative that you set an upperbound limit on the length of result or request size (server side!), and ideally configure your server to temp-ban a client who attempts too many requests that are too large in too short of a time span. Because if you don't, bad bots absolutely will eventually attempt to e.g. create a shopping cart with 99999999999999999 items in it. Or a search query with 4.7 gigabytes worth of keywords. Or whatever. Either because they're coded by morons or worse, because they're coded by someone who wants to see if they can break your site by doing stuff like that.

[–] petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

it's a good idea not to allow your site to generate any kind of circular self-referential loop that can be achieved via navigation or clicking on things

Don't nearly all sites have a logo at the top that will take you back to the homepage? I'm not really following.

My intuition is that the only safe solution is to rate limit requests; a poorly coded bot could definitely just be a while loop for the same URL ad infinitum.

[e] Unless there's something to this I'm not thinking about.

[–] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Apparently it can boosts engagement?

At the Times, which got 60 percent of its June visitors from mobile, the “show full article button” has resulted in “moderate increase” in the time readers spend, according to Paul Werdel, senior product manager on mobile.

Quartz, which also introduced its own “read full story” button alongside its design refresh in June, has used the button to boost the performance of its mobile Engage ads, which appear directly below the button. The Huffington Post uses a similar approach, presenting readers with a 300 x 250 banner ad below its own “read more” button. Huffington Post VP of Engineering Sam Napolitano said that preliminary data on the feature has been “very positive” since its addition.

https://digiday.com/media/publishers-mobile-truncated-page/

[–] Prking@lemmy.world 10 points 9 months ago (2 children)
  1. Some people prefer pages to scrolling (it’s amazing the strength of opinion about this for either point of view)
  2. Advertisements are charged per impression. So each page counts as a new impression
  3. Be grateful websites no longer auto scroll web pages
  4. Some things lend themselves to page by page. For example very long articles (this is why books replaced scrolls)
  5. Be grateful that websites stopped animating page turns etc
  6. Sometimes web developers don’t care and just use a bought in package
[–] conciselyverbose@kbin.social 2 points 9 months ago

I definitely scroll for web pages, but my ebook reader apps all give the option to do scrolling and I can't stand anything but pages for a book, so I get it.

(I do do most of my reading on eInk, so obviously scrolling wouldn't work there. But I don't do it exclusively. I read some on my phone and iPad as well and scrolling books feels awful.)

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

it’s amazing the strength of opinion about this for either point of view

Regardless of user preference, on the web it's a fool's errand to try to force your content into a page-by-page format. Designing a paged content presentation that's guaranteed to work on every device with every screen size is so close to impossible that it's not worth bothering. And that's before you take into account whether or not the user prefers to view in landscape or portrait, what aspect ratio their screen has, what zoom level their browser is set to, or even how their browser implements zoom and content rescaling. So 9 times out of 10, you'll wind up with your content being broken into pages that the user still has to scroll around in to see all of anyway. Or where everything will be illegibly microscopic. Or both! Especially if they turn up on a mobile device -- which is something like 92% of all web users these days. Every time you fail you will annoy the shit out of your user base, and you will fail more often than you succeed.

No, the sole driving factor behind sites breaking articles into "pages" is so they can load more ads on each page change.

(This does not apply to non-website mediums, obviously. IDGAF how you digest your e-books, manga, or whatever.)

[–] Prking@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

There we go, a strong opinion.

[–] JimmyBigSausage@lemm.ee 9 points 9 months ago

Because they want you to obnoxiously see as many ads as possible because they don’t care if you read the article, only view ads. This is the new shitty web. MSN, Newsweek and Yahoo are the scummy kings.

[–] oktoberpaard@feddit.nl 4 points 9 months ago

Maybe to make the article seem shorter, so you’re more inclined to keep reading. Once you’re halfway through, you’re more likely to want to read the rest. Both halves are probably filled with ads, so the longer you stick around, the better.

[–] KpntAutismus@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

while data collection and advertisement is a big part of it, they probavly try to "save" on bandwidth, you might not read the entire article.