Warning, Rant Ahead: Can We Please Kill Off One-Photo-Per-Page Lists?

This post is brought to you by one pissed off internet user.

I just can’t imagine I’m the only person who hates those one-photo-per-page photo lists (you know, the “top 10 beaches” “top 100 computer pictures”, etc). In fact, I know I’m not. Go on Digg.com and view the comments for such an article and you’ll see at least half the users are complaining about only having one photo per page. I’m at the point now that whenever I encounter such a horrible creation I will just leave the site, and never go back. It ticks me off that much. Here’s why:

For starters: it is incredibly annoying. It is no longer the 80s and we have the technology to display multiple images on a screen without any difficulty. Most people who surf around looking at those “top 10″ or “top 100″ lists will have a somewhat decent connection too. Even if you have dial up, it’s going to take forever either way. If you want to get technical, it is actually more efficient to list more on one page vs having it on multiple pages (less repeated html, less http packets, etc)

Not to mention, it is terrible for advertisers. A few years back I offered to put a few ads on a “friend’s” site, and I payed him per 1,000 views. He got around 15k views a month, not a ton, but it got me some extra exposure. Then he released an evil “top 100 celebrity images” blog post with one photo per page and suddenly my ads were shown over 100,000 times. Unfortunately, those 100,000 times were less valuable than the usual 15,000 requests. The CTR was terrible. In fact, there were fewer unique views that month than any other month.

I asked him why he didn’t put even 10 images per page, instead of 1 per page, especially since many comments on that post were from users complaining about that very thing. His response to me: “to get more ad revenue”.

Needless to say I only payed him for 15k views then cancelled the contract (which had clause allowing me to limit payments under certain circumstances btw). It would be nice if major ad companies would start doing that as well, just to discourage such crap. If your curious; his other advertiser (who contacted me a while after) quit the next month after having the same thing pop up again, and I’m pretty sure his site went down shortly after.

So can we please, for the love of the Internet, kill off those evil lists. There is absolutely NO reason you can’t list at least 5 items per page, Heck, 10 would be optimal. And if you want to give people the option to view just one image, fine, do that, it would be good for mobile users.

Since I hate ranting without solutions, here’s the perfect solution to this problem:

For non-mobile browsers: show 10 images (with an option to show only 10/5/2/1, etc).

For mobile: show only 1 or 2 (with options to show 10/5/2/1, etc, also).

There ya go.