What the hell is going on at ESPN.com?
 

This is starting to really annoy me.

Apparently, ESPN.com has now chosen to separate their articles onto different pages, making you click "continued..." links to keep reading the article. Presumably this is all to increase the amount of ads we see, and in turn, makes them more money. Do they really need this? Last night I was trying to read a Len Pasquarelli article about the Niners and the #1 pick, and the damn thing was unnecessarily on 4 pages!

Just now, I was trying to read this article about the Charles Woodson signing and it was on 2 pages, where 1 would have clearly been enough.

Am I the only one bothered by this?

Sportsline did this a while back, and ESPN has followed suit. Interesting about the ad reasoning. Never thought of that, though it makes perfect sense.

I saw that the other day. I could have sworn they had a button then that would let you put it all on one page, but I'm not sure.

I just noticed this the other night. Never really clicked with me - but it's just one more way the free Internet isn't necessarily free.

Soon, probably all worthwhile sites will require a paid service just to skip these multiple part web pages. Nickel and dime, nickel and dime, and then you ultimately realize your "web bill" is comparable to your cable bill.

ESPN.com is a terrible website that gets worse and worse every day - right on par with it's TV counterpart.

Yup. Used to check it every day, but now they have gone "pay" for so much, I rarely use it.

Yeah, I see that now. There's a "single page view" button at the bottom of the page. Of course, clicking on that opens...drumroll please...a new page with a new ad.

I don't see any ads.

From a web design perspective, there's at least some valid reasoning behind "chunking" an article into several pages. Some studies have shown that users are more lilely to read an article in pages than if they're presented in one long scrolling page.

That said, I hate the idea and almost always use the single page or "printer friendly" option to get everything on one page.

CNNSI does it as well. The other advantage, of course, is that it gives you data on who actually continues to read the entire article...and thus, if they have columnists that don't get read as much, they can respond appropriately.

I agree - I find myself going to espn.com less and less - what do you guys use instead. I have tried cbs sport line, yahoo sports and si but I don't like them as well either.

mostly TSN.ca - of course, I mostly am looking for hockey news (when there is such a sport) so ymmv

CNN's been doing it for awhile. Doesn't bother me so much, unless they have the "continued page" links screwed up, which has happened a ouple times already.

Agreed. The Daily Targum's continued page links never work.

You get what you pay for. If a decision proves unpopular enough to lose them some serious eyeballs, they will change back.

BTW.. they also (accidentally or deliberately) crash FireFox with Adblock too.

Glad to hear it's not only me getting the FireFox crashes.

I used to read Sporting News (tsn.com) a lot but ever since they merged or whatever with Fox, they've gone downhill.

SI

See if you can find the "ESPNlite" page & bookmark it instead of the regular one -- it seems to eliminate the whole Netscape/Mozilla crash problem (all you miss is the occasional story in the top right corner ... and all the annoying as hell stuff they do with with flash/etc.)

edit to add: duh me. Instead of "see if you can find", try this
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/lite/

I have Firefox 1.0 with Adblock and I can do it just fine. But their godforsaken ads still get through the popup blocker (I think it's doubleclick who do their ads). Asshats.

SI

I love it, thanks.

I stopped using ESPN a long time ago. The lite version has too many broken links, and is almost impossible to surf.

ah.. found a fix that worked for me.

Add the following into your adblocker

http://adsatt.espn.go.com/*