TheStreet.com – Awful User Experience = Pageviews at Any Cost?

On impulse I clicked on a story called, ’10 Richest Colleges in America’ as I was getting ready to head out on this fine Saturday afternoon. I was hoping I’d glance at a list, say ‘huh…whaddya know’ and be on my merry way.

http://www.thestreet.com/story/11449653/1/the-10-richest-colleges-in-america.html?cm_ven=outbrain

Not the case – after a 50 word introduction, I the visitor was left to sort through over 11 pages of content! The column size of the actual content is barely larger than the columns dedicated to financial quotes and adverts. I don’t mind this trick when they offer the option to ‘view all 10′ or however many ‘top things…’ they’re discussing but it’s nowhere to be found.

Come on, enough with the crap it’s 2012 and you’re lucky to have anyone on your site. I realize it’s a link from OutBrain which syndicates garbage content across the web but what the heck!? I know you’re a public company and pageviews = dollars but at what cost? Maybe it’s all incremental…garbage top 10 lists that pollute the Internet for so long people actually believe they’re reading ‘news’.

In any event – what are some good examples of not forcing visitors through absurd content funnels with scant information? You know, like a 30 second ad to watch a 1 minute video?

• YouTube – most of the time you can skip the advertisement after 5-10 seconds. The longest forced ad is only 15 seconds and there appears to be a correlation between the asset length and the required ad duration before skipping.
• Any site that lets you immediately view all without dealing with pagination.

I’d like to see if pageviews per session actually increased. Perhaps this is throw-away content and retention isn’t an issue? How can you measure whether or not the impact of a bad experience is felt across time, over many sessions which may fail to materialize as a result? That’s not easy to answer, but the obvious choice is not to create such nonsense in the first place. As a rule, create more pages if you have more REAL content.

Click here to see my outro,

Jeff