Pagination and page-view juicing are evil

Lately, I’ve been running into an annoying trend on mainstream news sites — publishers are sectioning articles into multiple pages. They will tell you that they do so to improve readability, page loading times, etc., but what it boils down is page view counts and advertising impressions. However, I’ve noticed that a lot of these sites will break a relatively short article into 4+ pages, with each page being around 4 paragraphs in length. Give me a break. When I run into these kind of articles, I read the first page and move on. Mike Davidson sums up the situation nicely:

Over the last several years, many publishers have convinced themselves that breaking up stories into sometimes as many as ten pages is an acceptable way to present content on the web. The realistic ones at least admit that it’s a cheap way to boost stats. The disingenuous (or naive) ones actually posit that they are improving readability and usability for their audiences by reducing scrolling. Because scrolling is so hard.

Additionally, I’ve seen a number of sites run top ten list-style articles, with each item in the list getting its own page. This format really breaks down when the list contains a lot of entries, such as the top 100 places to live in America, 2008.