Ad Fraud: Stuffing The Page-View Ballot Box

My May jeremiad on shoddy web site pagination practices (Online Advertising Page-View Fraud Growing) provoked a lot of emails, mostly from web and online professionals who would shun the practice except for (as one email phrased it) “powers that be who like the way that pagination stuffs the page-view ballot box.”

The fact that advertisers pay money based on exaggerated page views concocted through user-hostile pagination efforts is simply fraud.

And it is user-unfriendly, creates a hostile environment in which ads appear and has the effect of driving users away from the site.

“PAGE JUICING” = USER FRUSTRATION

Perhaps nothing raises the issue of web user frustration and hatred more intensely (and humorously) than this article from Salon: “Stop Pagination Now”:

“Pagination is one of the worst design and usability sins on the Web, the kind of obvious no-no that should have gone out with blinky text, dancing cat animations, and autoplaying music. It shows constant, quiet contempt for people who should be any news site’s highest priority—folks who want to read articles all the way to the end.

The piece then compares the practice to steroid use in sports:

“Pageview juicing is a myopic strategy. In the long run, unfriendly design isn’t going to help websites win new adherents, and winning new readers is the whole point of being a website. I bet that if all news sites switched to single-page articles—and BuzzFeed-style scrolling galleries instead of multipage slideshows—they’d experience short-term pain followed by long-term gain. Their articles would get shared more widely and, thus, win more loyal, regular visitors for the publication.

As evidence for this, the Salon piece cites Joshua Topolsky, editor of the Verge — one of the most heavily trafficked sites on the web who said:

“From the beginning, there’s been a company-wide belief that we can marry great advertising with great content and not have to cheat or trick our users. And so far, that’s proven 100 percent correct. Our traffic has been on a big climb, and I believe advertisers are really beginning to see the true value in engaged users who care (and return) versus sheer volume of pageviews (though our pageviews have also been through the roof).”

While the Salon article points to a popular rationalization among pagination proponents: That users like it, especially for long (such as 5,000+ word) articles, there is no credible data to support that contention,  and many other reasons that belie its validity.

PAGINATION CAUSES  VISITOR LOSS, MAJOR USABILITY ISSUES

Jakob Nielsen, a Principal in the Nielsen/Norman Group — the premier web site usability consulting firm — said in an online article ( Users’ Pagination Preferences and ‘View All’) that:

“Linear content flows—such as articles like this—should almost never be broken up into multiple screens. It’s better to show the full article on one long screen than to inflict the pain of additional steps on users when all they want to do is read an article, and thus stay within that one item.”

WEB SURFERS SAY “SAYONARA” TO SLOW DOWNLOADS

Download time is one of the greatest issues that drive visitors away. Every pagination offers yet another delay to drive users away.

Depending on whether you are looking at mobile or broadband (see bullets below) a web site will lose 33% of its visitors if a page fails to load in 4 to 8 seconds. And nearly ALL will be gone if the load reaches 15 seconds.

• How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line
• How Webpage Load Time Is Related to Visitor Loss

This page below (the mobile version of the article I used as an example in the previous article), took 18 seconds to download to my iPhone at Starbucks and  illustrates the issue:

 PAGINATION: USER HOSTILE AND AN ADVERTISER RIP-OFF

Users suffer and advertisers suffer: the only parties who benefit from pagination as currently practiced are unscrupulous sites who use it to charge more for advertisers than warranted.

Beware.

 MORE REFERENCES ON WEB PAGE USABILITY

• 10 Ways to Lose Web Site Visitors
• Users’ Pagination Preferences and ‘View All’
• 7 Best Practices for Improving Your Website’s Usability
• 10 Tips to Create a More Usable Web30 Usability Issues To Be Aware Of
• 10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of
• 10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs
• The Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines
• 43 Web Design Mistakes You Should Avoid
• 15 Things People Absolutely Hate About Your Website