For the last year I’ve been noticing the adoption of this feature, show the 1st or second paragraph of the article, then forcing readers to press a “Continue Reading” button that reveals the rest of the article after being pressed.
I think it’s an extra click that they force the reader to make, so what’s the gain with it? Does that button fires any other action other than revealing the rest of the article? What are the trade offs since reader can find it boring? Does it have something to do with loading via ajax the rest of the article and therefore improving the page loading times? What are your thoughts on this one? Which advantage for publishers does this feature bring to the table?
Definitely not because that would do away with the button and the need to click.
Generally the continue reading button is used when you have several articles with the first couple of paragraphs on the page and you click the button on the one that catches your interest to read the rest of that particular article. If there is only the one article on the page then the button is pointless unless you have it after every 10 to 15 paragraphs of an extremely long article that is spread over several pages.
Also, if you want to feature several articles on a page, and you display the entire articles instead of excerpts with “Read more …” links, the user would have to scroll down very far to get to the next article, and may in fact be unaware of its existence and miss it altogether. With the short excerpts, you can showcase several articles in a way that is easily visible to the user.
I’ve seen it used in big web sites in articles with 3 little paragraphs, and after pressing the button the 3rd paragraph with just a few words is revealed, and is showed on desktop, so I really think that people are over using it
Of course it has to be used properly. But personally I really don’t stay long on sites that display four or five full articles, one right after the other, on a single page. I can’t see at a glance what is available, and there is way too much scrolling.
Yeh those “continue reading” buttons are really annoying - I mean I’m trying to read the article FFS, why not just give me that and don’t force me to click to reveal the full thing? Either the marketing people are thinking it’s a good idea or there’s some “must have” plugin because everyone else is using it.
I have another guess. Mashable.com uses these buttons mobile and it lets you stop scrolling right below the first banner ad.
This is most probably a service they sell to their media marketers as this allegedly leads to more “involvement” with the advertising message…
