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

[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.