-
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...Permalink On twitter.com
♻️ 1 Retweets
❤️ 36 Favorites
Mood -1 🙁
-
swodinsky mmasnick dmarti It can also be used to trigger an ad load or paywall, though if you need a button for that is usually a poor engineer at fault, but to put it in context: In the early 2010s a lot of publishers used pagination because ad refreshing started being penalized...Permalink On twitter.com
❤️ 15 Favorites
Mood -4 🙁
-
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...Permalink On twitter.com
❤️ 11 Favorites
Mood +2 🙂
-
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...Permalink On twitter.com
❤️ 7 Favorites
Mood +3 🙂
-
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...Permalink On twitter.com
❤️ 8 Favorites
Mood +3 🙂
-
swodinsky mmasnick dmarti Eventually the excuse for this became that they were lazyloading content to keep the above the fold loading as quickly as possible (less images and less ads until the user goes to the next synthetic pageview). And maybe that was the case for some. But...Permalink On twitter.com
❤️ 6 Favorites
Mood -1 🙁
-
swodinsky mmasnick dmarti Eventually the pagination fell out of favor, in part because users hated it, in part because increased social sharing made sharing specific pages difficult (social crawlers don't load JS either), and in part because it was easy to program badly...Permalink On twitter.com
❤️ 6 Favorites
Mood -3 🙁
-
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...Permalink On twitter.com
❤️ 4 Favorites
Mood 0
-
swodinsky mmasnick dmarti On top of that modern browsers and ad systems built much better ways to handle lazy loading and there was basically no excuse other than sales' pitch decks (which could switch to refreshed impressions) and editorial ego...Permalink On twitter.com
❤️ 6 Favorites
Mood +1 🙂
-
swodinsky mmasnick dmarti So the stories continues / read more button persists as either a sign the site hasn't updated to be caught up with the times, a compromise to assuage an editor's ego, or an engagement metric (usually also for editorial egos) w/one terrible exception...Permalink On twitter.com
❤️ 6 Favorites
Mood -3 🙁
-
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...Permalink On twitter.com
❤️ 6 Favorites
Mood 0
-
swodinsky mmasnick dmarti And any publisher who wants that sweet cash, except for some of the largest ones, is stuck with it. Also because of bad engineering, but this time in chumboxes. So now you know why, and also why there was a significant pv deflation during the mid-2010s! wooo...On twitter.com
❤️ 6 Favorites
Mood +2 🙂
-
swodinsky mmasnick dmarti Every time you open the big book of digital publishing biz history it turns out to be filled with maggots!Permalink On twitter.com
♻️ 5 Retweets
❤️ 23 Favorites
Mood +1 🙂