Why do some websites have a "Continue Reading" button?
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?
It's two fold:
it's good proof of "user interaction with site" to sell to advertisers
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.
Enshittification
Because fuck you, that's why.
My guess is that this gives them data they can analyze on how many people actually read the page that far.
It also generated clicks so they can charge advertisers more for views.
That's... not how that works
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.
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)
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…
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
Then you click it, and it's like 2 sentences and the rest is ads. Might be one of the reasons.
Just a guess: to prevent bots from scraping the full content?
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.
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.
Apparently it can boosts engagement?
https://digiday.com/media/publishers-mobile-truncated-page/
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.)
There we go, a strong opinion.
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.)
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.
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.
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.