Some article websites (I’m looking at msn.com right now, as an example) show the first page or so of article content and then have a “Continue Reading” button, which you must click to see the rest of the article. This seems so ridiculous, from a UX perspective–I know how to scroll down to continue reading, so why hide the text and make me click a button, then have me scroll? Why has this become a fairly common practice?
My guess is that this gives them data they can analyze on how many people actually read the page that far.
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That’s… not how that works
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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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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