An alarming trend is spreading across the web and infecting content like a virus. Yes people, I’m talking about The Jump, and more specifically, its cursed accompanying phase More after the jump. Just. Stop. It.
The Jump it would seem, refers to advertising that has been slapped inline with the content, content has been split over a couple of pages, or some other purely presentational reason. It’s the online equivalent of TV’s “join us after the break”, and it’s as annoying as hell. I find this to be an offence for a number of reasons, some practical, others social. More after the jump.
See?! Anyway, this is a bad idea is because a lot of the time there simply is no jump. If you read any of these sites via their XML feeds, there’s no presentation and any ads get thrown in at the end of the article, if at all, and so there’s nothing to disrupt the flow except for the pointer that the flow is about to be disrupted, which brings me to my second point.
One of the great blessings of advertising online is that it can exist in parallel with the content. Unlike TV, which is serial in its timeline-tethered delivery, online solutions are able to expose the user to advertising without that advertising actually getting in the way of the content flow. That is, until the ad is jammed in between two paragraphs.
The inlining isn’t so much of a problem in itself – after all it really isn’t much effort for your eyes to skip over the ad – but combine this with a blatant notification of “look out, here comes an ad!” it’s no longer a simple case of interrupting the flow of the eye – you’re interrupting the thought process of the reader too. You’ve crossed the line between whoring your screen real-estate and page impressions, and are into the territory of whoring your content.
The issue highlighted by the lack of ads in XML feeds is an important one. Typically, advertising is not part of your main article content. By refering to the ad in your content, you create a tie between the content and the presentation of the content – two things we normally strive to separate. Redesign your site, change your advertising model or even just repurpose your content in some way and you’re still left with an inane “More after the jump” embedding in your content, which makes even less sense now than it did when there was something to jump.
So if you really must inline advertising with your content, my plea is this. Please don’t mention it. Pretend that advertising is just not there. That way, when your readers get to the ad they can just skip over it and carry on, plus your content is not tied to this very temporary presentation implementation.
However, if you really, really do feel you need to warn users that your article continues after the big flashing marketing message you’re about to damage their retinas with, put the warning in your presentation layer along with the ad, and keep it out of the main content. That’s all I ask.
Comments
I think a nice tutorial I haven’t seen is how to customize the “continue reading” portion. I know how to do this in Livejournal, but for Wordpress or Movable Type, I’m clueless.
Oh, the day when there’s an advertising solution that doesn’t beat me about the eyeballs – unless I ask it to.
I know that if when I paid for cable they gave me a form to fill out that listed products and things I’m interested in just so they could filter the advertising – I’d do it. It’d make the ads more effective and me less irritated. I’ve long thought that’s the solution for television (Tivo could bring that, no?) but as far as ads getting in the middle of the content and then people “jumping” – keep your stupid catch phrases confined to Starbucks and leave me alone.
On a few sites I frequent, the front page has a long list on entries. While most of those entries are no longer than a few paragraphs and display in their entirety on the front page, the few longer articles only have the first couple paragraphs displayed, and the reader has to go to the individual entry to read the rest. While there is nothing wrong with that in itself, these sights use differing methods of telling us that that is the case. “more…”; “read the rest if this article”; “continue”; and “More after the jump” are a few I’ve seen. The problem comes, not in displaying that link, but in including it in the content of the article. It should only be displayed on the front page (or in rss summary) with the incomplete article, not when the entire article is displayed. Part of the problem may be that the blog package their using doesn’t automaticly offer such functionality, so it’s just easier to include it in the main article content. Its part bad software, part uneducated user. Time to educate the masses. Oh wait, thats what your doing here with this entry. More power to ya!
So I don’t think that advertising has to get in your way in order to be effective. Increasingly I think we’re seeing that type of advertising become less effective simply due to lash-back.
At least then the reader simply follows the text, without the writer resorting to “Hump Jump” links.
“More after the jump” says that your advertisers are more important than your readers. First BIG mistake.
Unfortunatley, they have cottoned onto the fact that most web-users are willing to scroll down. In fact, many a blogger or forum testifys to the stories of people who have decided that scrolling down is not all bad after all. I believe the advent of blogger-phenonenom started that …
Worse still, it is superflous code on the page which the webmaster has to allow for. Having a float:right attribute on a layer that is less than half the width of the space allowed for the article.
If I can figure that out, surely any news-site can too.
Thank you. There are other ways to say this, and the word “jump” is just … awkward. “More…”, “Continued…” or as Drew recommends, “Read on…”. Or why not just be honest and say “You get all this great content for free because our advertisers pay the bills. If you love us, click their ads, buy their stuff, and continue reading the story.”
And none of this phony “sponsor” crap, either. They’re not your sponsors. Do they “assume responsibility for you during a period of instruction, apprenticeship, or probation”? I think not. Do they “vouch for your suitability of a candidate for admission”? Hardly. Are they legislators proposing or urging passge of a bill? Well, maybe. But what they are, is advertisers. Don’t lie to me.
Even more irritating are the “More after the jump” hyperlinks that link to the same article you’re reading without even an anchor tag. The effect is that what comes after the jump is actually content which is before your current position in the article. (eg: http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2006/5/16/3997 ) This really is ridiculous, and it violates whatever standard that is which says that hyperlinks should be anchored to useful text, not arbitrary placeholders like “click here” which don’t describe where you are being taken.
Couldn’t agree with you more, finding it all over the place, and it’s quite annoying. :x
This looks to me like the prostitution of the internet… Thanks for the heads up.
Here’s a neat idea: create a Firefox extension that can remove or hide “after the jump”.