Comment on Why do some websites have a "Continue Reading" button?

• FuglyDuck@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  That’s exactly how that works.

  Increased traffic to your website increases the value of ad space on that website and they pay you more for it; the “read more” button is one tool to demonstrate MSN or whoever actually has traffic.

  It’s far from the only tool, but it is one tool, and is part of the analytics they’re running. It also shows some amount of engagement, that people are actually readin the article rather than clicking on it and forgetting about.

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  • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I mean the best way to increase the value of your ad space is to have a small but visible amount and to produce content good enough that advertisers come to you, rather than the other way around

    The issue there is that it takes effort to produce good content and it’s easier to just paraphrase existing/ai generate new content, which results in a “read more” button (unrelated to a “enter your email to read more” option which is 100% for advertising as a replacement for 3rd party cookies, and allows for users to see and decide exactly what websites to share their identity with as an active decision, rather than shadier stuff behind the scenes like cookies or fingerprinting where they’re tracking you without you even knowing, so expect to see a lot more of it as they go away)

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    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      And why does good content cause advertisers to come to you?

      Traffic. The more people come through your site, the more valuable the ad-space, the more they’re willing to pay.

      Good content in niche areas will also increase value, yes, but there’s a reason websites pay for SEO services…

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      • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Yes, but not as exclusively as you might think. There’s an increasing number of manually vetted “premium” sites (for better or worse, as it reduces SEO spam while also making it harder for good but niche content to break through) which provide actually good content, as irritated people looking for a sentence in a multipage article aren’t going to look kindly on ads, whereas engaged people reading good content will

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