Multiple pages - really, why?

I have somewhat of a minor gripe, but it really burns my britches.  So just like that, you’ll have to deal with it.  The gripe: the WSJ photoblog has changed their format.  It used to be that you would click on the page, and it would load (albeit slowly, sometimes – there are a lot of high-quality pictures there, usually). Starting a short while ago, with a short hiatus which ended today, they shifted the format: you load the day’s photos, and then there are more pages of photos.  There might be two or three pages.

The main gripe: when I’m looking at pictures online, I’m in the zone.  Particularly if it’s news-related.  With the WSJ now, I get to the bottom and… have to wait for the next page to load.  Just a few seconds?  Eff you: I’m on the other side of the country.  It takes a while. This multi-page policy completely interrupts the flow of my reading.

Think like this: you’re reading a great article on the front page of a newspaper. It tells you to skip to the back.  Now, in the middle of the article: stop the person for two minutes.  Hell, stop me for twenty seconds: concentration is completely lost, and I might as well not read the article at all.  The interruption has to be small.

But it’s not small.  Twenty seconds would be a dream, where I’m at – and in any case, it prevents me from going backwards, or scrolling up and down.

The thing is, I’m not really sure *why* this is.  It’s not like the extra pages do anything other than piss people off.  Are they so desperate for ad revenue that they want the single ad at the top to get two more impressions?

Really, it’s senseless.