Joshua Benton of Nieman Lab writes about how business news site Quartz is now using a “Read Full Story” button at the bottom of its stories.
Benton writes, “The rise of social distribution has meant the rise of one-off visits — readers who come in the side door and exit right back out to the social platform from whence they came. No matter how good your content, some number of readers are going to abandon your story a few grafs in; why not give them some other options and throw in another ad impression while you’re at it? The bet here is that you’re annoying readers less with that extra tap than you are luring them into another article.
“In a way, you can think of this as a natural response to responsive design. On desktop, article pages often have a main article well with one or more sidebars, filled with shiny things to click. On mobile, those shiny things tend to get pushed down below the article text — which, if the article’s lengthy, can be many screenfuls of scrolling away. This Quartz model puts the alternative actions closer to where the reader might see them.
“(Note too that this marks the end of infinite scroll on mobile at the site that first popularized it in news circles. Now, after the end of a story, you get a list of headlines to pick from — not the full text of the next story.)
“To give credit where it’s due, Zach mentions that the inspiration here is The New York Times, which started doing something similar on its mobile article pages last year for side-door non-logged-in mobile visits.”
Read more here.
