By R. Michael Brown, Marketing Consultant & Freelance Writer
Are they making us watch PowerPoint on the Web?
It seems the latest trend for publishing web articles that want to show the top 10 or 25 etc. of a topic, issue, or trend, is to show a big picture and a blurb about each one with a giant button for you to click to see the next best in the list.
They always start with the 10th or 25th and make you click and reload the whole page, slowly working your way to the first in the list.
In a top 25 article it could take 15 minutes or more to go through the ugly process to finally see the number 1 in the list. Time waster!
A reader has to be pretty motivated to wade through the webpage loading and reloading. It reminds me of the most boring PowerPoint presentation you can imagine, just because of the waiting.
I know why web publishers do it. They want you to be exposed to all the ads surrounding the content… up to 25 pages of them. Ugh. This is not a site I will revisit because of the waste of my time.
A better option is to list each item as thumbnails all on one page. That gives the viewer the option to go right to #1 and explore all the others if they want. And if you’re the publisher you can still put ads on each individual page so the viewer will see them when they expand the thumbnail.
Anytime you take away control from your viewer and force them to do something, you risk paying the price in damaging your brand, page view and satisfaction rate, engagement rate, and subscriber numbers.
What to Do
What NOT to Do
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