None of the issues you have with the competition you are feeling has anything to do with breaking a post up into multiple pages. They are usually still stuck in legacy software which came that way due to a lot of misconceptions and myths (assumptions based on no facts or research) on page clicks and traffic. The more pageviews the higher level you once could get from advertisers. This is no longer true in a world of AJAX ads and pageviews not counting like they used to. And even then, smart surfers like me knew to hit the Print button to read the entire article on one page without sending it to our printers.

Forget all that and focus on new and innovative and make it yours.

I’m not sure if many people ever read them or if their majority traffic comes from their 13 year presence on the internet and arguing fanboys on their forums… I’m just trying to succeed as an individual with easy to understand (and probably one page) reviews that regular folks won’t have to attend a 4 year course to understand, (also since I dont have a full time 20 person team to write 17 pages worth per review with goodness knows how many words, versus the single page 3000 word reviews I currently do on a ‘free time’ basis) though I am puzzled about the success of these big sites with multi pages.

Does success or being an ‘established’ (by that I mean starting up during the late 1990s or early 2000s) lead to readers who are more likely to ‘click’ to the next page? Or do they suffer equally as smaller time sites from the reader frustrations listed in your cons above?
Also I know this is an older article but I hope you take an ‘updated’ look at this one vs many page debate now that 4 years has passed. Apple introduced a new feature (I forgot what the name was called) in iOS5 which enables iphone and ipad readers to ‘take and compress’ multiple page posts into one single ad-free article. I’m also wondering if that means multi-page posts are about to go the way of the dodo within the next couple of years.

This said, and although I know how reading on a screen is far different from reading a publication, how do you do when caught up by a subject on a magazine, you simply turn the page because it’s interesting. Why would you do it if it was not???

I guess to some extend we should all stop thinking that people are lazy as this is how we – the said prescriptors – on our respective disciplines have contributed to give them a whole bunch of bad habbits over the lost years, beginning with the fact that everything is supposed to be free, which would give birth to illegal downloading for instance…

What do you think? All the best, Frederic