As soon as I hit a page with multiple pages I almost always lose interest and immediately leave. I can read down a single page. However when I see an article with 6 pages I am like ... ... sod that.
Its not so much the reading. Its the slow page loading which gets me down. If people did pagination right with ajax preloading the next page then I would be happy. 99% of sites do not do this. Instead their sites are slow because they have to load a bunch of third party ad's. Moving from page to page when each page takes 2-3 seconds to load kills the reading experience.
A Wired article featured on HN recently. I don't remember what it was about but it had a gallery on it. You would think in today's day and age when you click the thumbnail the main image would change. On this wired story no.. the whole page reloaded. Due to third party ad's each page load took ages. The page didn't bounce down to where the image should show. While I thought the topic was interesting the user experience was so terrible I abandoned it.
If you are going to force pagination on readers then have a single page option. Preferably at the top of the article. This way you cater for everyone.
Most Wired articles that contain galleries have a 'view all' link to a page that has all of the gallery images on it. The link isn't well signposted but the resulting page offers a far better reading experience.
Use something like readability or open all the pages in background tabs (ctrl-click) before you get to the end of page 1.
I almost never read long articles to the end, unless I've added them to readability. If I can't open them in the background so they're loaded when I want them, I usually don't bother
I think you've hit the nail on the head. I was just thinking the same thing last week, wondering why I hate pagination when I used to like it. I realized it's the time it takes to load, which is probably due to the ads. I'm on a broadband cable connection, and some of the sites take 5-10 seconds to load the next page. One popular site a few days ago took 15 seconds to load the next page. Maybe I have a neighbor hogging cable bandwidth, but still the pages with 3rd party ads are noticeably worse.
Its not so much the reading. Its the slow page loading which gets me down. If people did pagination right with ajax preloading the next page then I would be happy. 99% of sites do not do this. Instead their sites are slow because they have to load a bunch of third party ad's. Moving from page to page when each page takes 2-3 seconds to load kills the reading experience.
A Wired article featured on HN recently. I don't remember what it was about but it had a gallery on it. You would think in today's day and age when you click the thumbnail the main image would change. On this wired story no.. the whole page reloaded. Due to third party ad's each page load took ages. The page didn't bounce down to where the image should show. While I thought the topic was interesting the user experience was so terrible I abandoned it.
If you are going to force pagination on readers then have a single page option. Preferably at the top of the article. This way you cater for everyone.