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?
That’s… not how that works
That’s exactly how that works.
Increased traffic to your website increases the value of ad space on that website and they pay you more for it; the “read more” button is one tool to demonstrate MSN or whoever actually has traffic.
It’s far from the only tool, but it is one tool, and is part of the analytics they’re running. It also shows some amount of engagement, that people are actually readin the article rather than clicking on it and forgetting about.