How BankRate.com Juices Up Page Views: Bank Rate Advertisers Beware
It’s common for large content rich sites to implement measures to increase page views and decrease bounce rate but BankRate.com appears to be taking this philosophy to a whole new level. The reason that most sites want to increase page views is of course to theoretically better engage visitors but usually the real force behind the quest for more and more page views is that most advertisers pay on a cost per impression basis so the greater the number of page views the more moola the website makes.
I will admit that there is a fine line between splitting up an article into easy to read sections and incorporating rich media like pictures into an article to enhance the user experience and just downright chopping up an article into ridiculously small pieces with each piece on a separate page purely to increase page views.
For example, 
While doing market research for one of my finance sites I can’t tell you how annoying it was to try and read this 672 word article over on Bank Rate and have to click through 7 different pages to read the full article. Yes, 7 pages for a measly 672 words of content. That means that each page has maybe a paragraph or two (although page 1 is the longest by far) and since I can speed read then I practically have to keep clicking to the next page every second or so (maybe this means that an additional benefit to this article chunking strategy is that they hope that users will inadvertently click on ads as they are constantly being forced to click away simply to read a short article…)
Anyway, here is page 1 of the article and have fun clicking through 6 more times all to read just 672 words: http://www.bankrate.com/finance/mortgages/5-reasons-to-buy-a-home-during-holidays-1.aspx
What do you think of this content chunking strategy?
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If there is valuable content, I’m glad to click, I’m happy to let the presenter of that content present me with an ad or two along the way.
For the past few years, Bankrate has forgotten the “valuable content” part and only offers low quality crap. They used to practice decent journalism there. They’ve become cheerleading whores for their advertisers.
I agree – I have no problem at all with a site having advertisements – even a lot of advertisements for that matter but they had better have some strong content to be able to get away with it! – Joel
Honestly, so many large news sites have been doing this lately that it has been driving me nuts.
You figure they’d care a tad bit more about their readers, but nope!
Glad to see that I am not the only one that is driven crazy by this! – Joel
I’m wondering if they have found the formula for their site for unique content and keyword density…I really doubt it, but I’ve come to learn that people (and sites) aren’t as dumb as they first appear.
If they’ve hit the top of the bell curve for a certain type of traffic and the CTR for the ads, then all the site is doing is a kind of “organic arbitrage”. Given the lead gen revenue and adsense payouts on a high PR bank site, one has to assume that they spend time and money perfecting this. They can’t be oblivious to organic search engine traffic, right?
Having said this, they put the page navigation at the top right when they could have stuck it under some banner ads or better yet, an adsense ad, and at the very least to grab those accidental clicks which would be more in line with their approach since they don’t seem to be really into the whole “visitor experience” thing.
Very interesting thoughts – it makes me wonder if it may prove very useful to go back through the Internet Archives via the Wayback Machine and take a look at how different highly trafficked sites have changed their layouts (especially the ones that have kept the same form of monetization) because any site with a large amount of traffic in a given niche has likely tested many different things to death so for a smaller site it would make sense to copy some of the template to some degree. – Joel