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swodinsky mmasnick dmarti In my experience a lot of publishers use it to trigger another entirely BS pageview to inflate their metrics, but I know some others use it to measure engagement when they have poor capacity to measure scroll depth, or they want to know if the user actually read the piece...
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swodinsky mmasnick dmarti So to increase pageviews (useful for direct sales) and ad impressions while still having long meaty stories, publishers broke up the page into multiple pages to create new page loads for new ad loads. This rocketed impressions & pageviews and caused addictive metric inflation...
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swodinsky mmasnick dmarti Unfortunately, Google decided they didn't like this practice & a great deal of pubs found their SEO punished for the strategy, but they were addicted to the page loads, so we got something called a synthetic pageview, which allowed you to create a pageview without a url change...
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swodinsky mmasnick dmarti With the synthetic pageview in place they could have the full story in place for search spiders (who didn't load JS at the time), & then use JS to create pagination (good versions leveraged anchor links as well). The synthetic pageview let them keep the inflation of pvs & imps...
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swodinsky mmasnick dmarti And the bidding systems built ways to tell bidders they could choose or not choose ads that refreshed... & most buyers didn't give a crap about the refresh. So pagination dropped from popularity like a stone, but people didn't think through the fact that this would drop pvs...
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swodinsky mmasnick dmarti Many content recommendation scripts (Taboola/Outbrain/etc...) require it in their contacts b/c they can't auto load their messy scripts on slow mobile sites, so this way they can trigger early in-viewport and higher up. Which allows them to juice their impressions on mobile...