Dan Lewis

How Outside Magazine’s Pagination Scheme Cost Them Money

Outside Magazine covers participatory sports and, by extension, professional cycling. They’re hawkishly covering the recent developments in the Lance Armstrong doping saga — and, in one case, adding to it. They ran an 11-page first-person account by Armstrong’s former Man Friday, Mike Anderson, and his less-than-positive experiences with Armstrong.

Eleven digital pages, that is.

Pagination online is a bit of a fiction. There is rarely, if ever, a technical reason for allowing all the text to appear on one page. Publications do it for readability, I guess, but more obviously, to increase the number of page views and therefore ad impressions (and therefore, revenue). But in the case of the Outside Mag piece linked above, it probably hurt them.

As of this writing, the article has about 2,500 Facebook “likes” and another 900 tweets. It’s shortened bitly link has about 11,000 clicks. Figure it did about five times that, and each click averaged three pages per visit, and we’re looking at 150,000 page views. As anyone who has ever published anything online knows, that’s a lot. A whole lot, in fact.

I have a Chrome extension install which shows me if a page has been submitted to reddit, and if so, how many times. I used that to see how reddit handled the page and took the screen shot above. For something so virally strong, you’d think that it’d do better that a couple of middling posts topping out at 41 net upvotes in the sports subreddit (which at about 70,000 subscribers is pretty small).

What’s going on? There’s a one-page, ad-free printable version available. There’s a link to it in the right sidebar of the main article. That article has 4,300 bitly clicks, so it spread via Twitter pretty well, too. And on Reddit?

That 1,000+ one is a front page hit. The 209 probably hung around there too. And there’s another 100+ which got cut off. My guess is that the printable version did about 50,000 uniques — uniques which never saw the ads.

Outside may have come out ahead here, but I doubt it. They traded in a lot of uniques for a lot of secondary and tertiary page views. And they have a lightbox popup for new readers, asking them to subscribe — but, of course, not on the printable page.

What’s odd, though, is that Outside Mag has a single-page, ad-laden version of the article. There’s no obvious link to that page anywhere — and I perused the page source in hopes that there was one there, somewhere. That could have been the reddit link. But it wasn’t. It did about 800 clicks via bitly. It was submitted to reddit once with six upvotes. Only six.

I’m not here to pick on Outside Mag. Most places make this mistake. But here’s the key thing:

Those who share well care about the people they share with. They’ll do whatever they can to make it better for that audience. Give them what they want — everything on one page, somehow, please! — or they’ll figure it out anyway. And you’ll lose.