Some article websites (I’m looking at msn.com right now, as an example) show the first page or so of article content and then have a “Continue Reading” button, which you must click to see the rest of the article. This seems so ridiculous, from a UX perspective–I know how to scroll down to continue reading, so why hide the text and make me click a button, then have me scroll? Why has this become a fairly common practice?
Because they want you to obnoxiously see as many ads as possible because they don’t care if you read the article, only view ads. This is the new shitty web. MSN, Newsweek and Yahoo are the scummy kings.