In a meeting at work the other day, we briefly discussed the possibility of going with an endless scroll on our blog (i.e. as you finish reading one post, the next one auto-loads below–extra pageviews and ad impressions for all!).
The chief objection: we don’t blog often enough on thematically similar subjects to be able to deliver an experience that makes sense for a user–the only option we’d have would be to list everything by date, rather than interest.
If you want to know what that looks like in real life, consider these two posts from Bloomberg, which just autoscrolled into my life:
A first-world problem (whose headline grossly misrepresents what appears to be a lightly edited piece of PR fluff straight from an accounting firm), followed by an actual problem in a developing nation that will impact millions of people with potentially disastrous consequences for an already fragile economy.
In a world where the goal is to deliver relevant content to your users, there’s no scenario that I can think of where you’d serve piece A to readers of piece B, or vice versa. Sure, there’s a certain joy to discovering things you didn’t know you’d be interested in–the kind of experience that you can get by reading a physical newspaper, for example. But on the otherwise ever-more-highly-curated-to-your-tastes web today, this kind of context-free discovery smacks less of a concern for broadening the minds of the consumer, and more of a desperate attempt to keep you around long enough to generate an additional impression.
The Incongruity of the Endless Scroll In a meeting at work the other day, we briefly discussed the possibility of going with an endless scroll on our blog (i.e.
