SINGLE PAGE….With a slowdown in advertising prompting online sites to cut back on their ad inventory, Felix Salmon suggests one easy way to do it:
In the early days of the web, in an attempt to goose pageviews, publishers started asking readers to click through two or three or sometimes even a dozen different pages to get through one story. It’s annoying and self-defeating, and I devoutly wish that a move to reduce inventory will kill off this miserable habit.
….Every time I go to a website like the NYT or The Big Money, the need to hunt around for the “single page” button and click on it and wait for the page to reload makes me hate the site just a tiny bit. For really gruesome offenders like Time, I simply don’t read a lot of their listicles, no matter how good they are, because the multiple-page format makes them all but unreadable. Now that the need to maximize inventory has disappeared, maybe this whole annoying thing will go away.
Sign me up! The multiple page format is both stupid and obsolete, and it’s long past time to get rid of it. The worst offenders are sites that break stories up into three or four (or more) chunks and sites whose only option for single-page reading is a “printer format” that’s clunkily formatted and annoying to read. I’m with Felix on this: time to knock it off, folks.
