1) I become disinterested, in which case no amount of website engineering is going to change things.
2) I see a large break, such as a large advertisement, and wrongly assume the article has ended. Here, scrolling is not the problem, the problem is that the design isn't telling me there's something more to see. The minimization of scroll bars in current browser design (I can't even remember if this was a toggle I manually switched anymore) adds to this. The websites that have a counter of percent read on the side are good design to address this.
Part of the reason this article succeeds is the author is such a great writer. Establishing rhythm in the way described is more of an art than a science.
I read the first two paragraphs, then this "Meanwhile, in a piece written for TIME, Tony Haile from Chartbeat wrote that 66% of attention happens below the fold. Now that is interesting. What’s going on here?"
I didn't find that interesting, simply a restatement that 34% of the attention was above the fold. I quickly scrolled to the end and closed the page without really reading anything else.
You misread the statistics. And on top of that misread the particulars
> Take note, however, that in an update to that article made in 2010 and then in 2018, his firm’s eye tracking studies were showing that attention to information below the fold was much less focused. Specifically, information above the fold received 57% of a user’s viewing time and everything else — every “screenful of content” below the fold — received 17% or less.
Based on eye tracking, 57% of viewing time was "above the fold". And thus 43% was below the fold.
> Tony Haile from Chartbeat wrote that 66% of attention happens below the fold
People spend more time looking above the fold, but pay more attention to what they see below the fold.
It's definitely ambiguous, but the fold is the first page division. Once the viewer is on another page they can't be paying attention to a page that they are no longer on.
Later on I thought that the conflict between these statistics might be from different page sets shown to research subjects. Which would highlight the importance of page design (and content) in maintaining user attention (regardless of scrolling). If so, this point could have been clearer in the article.
Personally barriers to scrolling are either:
1) I become disinterested, in which case no amount of website engineering is going to change things.
2) I see a large break, such as a large advertisement, and wrongly assume the article has ended. Here, scrolling is not the problem, the problem is that the design isn't telling me there's something more to see. The minimization of scroll bars in current browser design (I can't even remember if this was a toggle I manually switched anymore) adds to this. The websites that have a counter of percent read on the side are good design to address this.
Good advice here.