Dear smartypantsweb

[prog]

What's the purpose of having jumps ("Click for more...") on long blog articles?

I'm not talking about sites that break stories across 10 short pages so that they can expose you to 10 times as many ads. I mean the click-once-to-read-the-entire-post style that I very often see on popular blogs. Random example: Andrew Sullivan puts a "Continue Reading [topic]..." link at the bottom of posts which reach past a certain vertical length, maybe one out of every four of the posts on the front page.

I can guess some reasons, but what reasons does the conventional wisdom hold? (Yes, I'm wondering if we should institute something like this for the Gameshelf.)

Comments

[melskunk.livejournal.com]

Because they know people don't like huge blocks of text on a "front page" type scroll?

[jazzfish]

So that someone can say "this is not going to interest me" and scroll past it easily and quickly to get to the posts that do interest them. Gives them a reason to not navigate away from the page when bored.

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

so that you can skim down a set of stories and only read the ones you want ti go into further. Also, if there's a lot of pics and stuff, it can reduce load time for the front page.

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

PS, I only like this when the articles are really long -- otherwise it wastes my time.

Also, it may interact weirdly with RSS readers.

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

I don't know, but, with the exception of blogs that -always- have really long posts, or lots of images, I dislike it. The best way I've seen it implemented is on sites where the "Click more" does not open a whole new window/tab, but just expands the text on the same page (Shakesville is the only blog I read that does this). This meets my obsessive need to have everything on one page and also be able to quickly skim past stuff that bores me.

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

I think it's the same as how magazines put two or three pages of an article in the front of a magazine, with pictures and nice layouts, and then say "continued on page 124". The front section of a magazine or blog is easy-to-read and an advertisement for the rest of the content. If someone wants to get an in-depth treatment, they go to a more data-dense section.

Another reason would be for content that isn't typical of the blog - "normally we're a worksafe blog, but we feel the need to discuss something with NSFW images, so they're behind the cut."

[keimel.livejournal.com]

I also seem to recall that the default behavior of WP on install is to do this.

I am sure that default behavior on install is partially to blame for much of this.

[theeidolon.livejournal.com]

1) Easier skimming through multiple blog entries without one filling up the whole screen
2) Cover possible objectionable/spoilerish/special interest/high bandwith material
3) Track readership, to see which individual articles people actually read through
(I imagine this would be of interest to advertisers as a more useful measure than
just page views...)
4) Better visual appeal (long blocks of text can drive readers away).

[cortezopossum.livejournal.com]

For TRULY long articles it's just easier to load and scroll through an article if it is broken up into smaller pages. If you have to stop reading at some point you can say "Oh.. I stopped at page 3" vs. having to figure out where you stopped in a huge scrolling document.

I think most commercial sites do it so they can cycle through more ads without having to load dozens in a single page.

[mr-choronzon.livejournal.com]

sucks for the front page to show only one article.

I like when they have a little "+" you can click on to expand the article inline.

[mrmorse.livejournal.com]

I've seen some people state that they do it to artificially increase page views. They also only post the first paragraph of posts to their RSS feeds to get people to click through to the actual blog.

The tradeoff is that they lose readers when people decide they don't want to click through and there's no point to reading partial posts.

[mrmorse.livejournal.com]

Also, Andrew Sullivan posts lots of short things, with the occasional long item. Putting the long items behind a link maintains the visual rhythm of the page. Making readers click through for every article is annoying. If most posts are below a particular length, hiding longer posts makes more sense.

[cnoocy]

That's also true if your users are reading your blog on something like the LJ Friends page, where there are a lot of short posts.