What you're talking about is called lazy loading. It loads text first and CSS and then images after.
Most modern sites now do this along with needing to load it at all until you hit the continue button. That not only reduces your browser load, it also reduces server load as well.
There are many other reasons to have the continue button, but the positives outweigh the negative. It's not considered a dark pattern and helps the content team improve on their content.
It depends on the site. A recipes site is trying to get as many impressions as possible so they can either turn a profit or keep the lights on.
If your company doesn't rely on ads to stay afloat, the site experience is better.
If you dislike the page, exit the page within 10ish seconds without clicking anything and you will hurt the page's SEO ranking.
As I mentioned, small mom and pop shops can't afford to give you free content without ads. So they prioritize the ad so they can get paid for the impression.
Unfortunately the content is not free to create and maintain.
Some of my clients do not have the budget to give you free content without ads. Even a (usable)shared hosting server costs around 25 bucks a month. Add in dev time and design, small mom and pop sites can't afford to be ad free.
Only the big dogs do paywalls.
Then the article isn't strong enough and will be rewritten. The more relevant it is in your search, the higher chance you will continue reading.
Dude, plus they do everything. Has packaging mailing service, calls a taxi service, pay bills, banking services, photo printing, ....
There list is endless.
That kinda looks like a young Mike Meyer
Web Manager here. Some good answers here. Let me add a few more.
Engagement. If you land on a page and don't engage on the page and leave, Google doesn't even count you as a User. The more things you do on the page, Google will rank you higher.
Data analysts: we are testing if the article is valuable or not. If nobody is clicking continue, we know that we might need to rework the article.
Page load: The biggest and I mean biggest reason someone leaves a page is page load speed. If you're deep in researching some information, regardless of your internet speed or if the fault is on the user side and your page load is over 3 seconds, you will leave the site. Loading only 1/4 of the page helps with this along with other tricks like caching at the CDN and lazy loading.
There are tons more reasons, but we found that with the "Continue" button, it wasn't detrimental to the site performance.
In Taiwan, it's very rare to see public trash cans. Some government places have trash cans but it's very spread out. Yet in Taiwan you rarely see trash on the road. That's because they drill in your head at an early age that you take your trash with you and toss it out at home.
I think the only other country I have seen this done is Japan.
Thanks for the TIL
Fuck the CCP. Just leave us alone.
I started my career in SEO and moved into web Manager because it was just too tiring keeping up with Google. I think my last update that I could remember was called "Panda". This is when they named their updates.
My current SEO strategy is super simple. Have the content you're writing for relate as much as possible to the user intent. Give the user what they are looking for FAST and then crosslink, cross sell after. You will have a good page.