Remember when you were a teenager and your parents embarrassed you by trying to be ‘hip’ and ‘cool’ in front of your friends? That’s exactly how I feel about Time Magazine right now, with their list of Top 25 Blogs. Nevermind the fact that the list is highly subjective and excludes many great blogs. The problem is that the 25 different blogs are spread out on 25 freakin pages, plus an intro page. That’s 26 clicks to view a boring list of blogs, most of which everybody knows about already. (Yes there is a link to see the entire list in one page, but it’s buried).

As I wrote the other day, every click is a price. Hands up who is willing to pay 26 clicks for Time’s list? I wonder how many people clicked more than one or two times. In the talk by Aza Raskin that I linked the other day, he doesn’t provide any hard data but he mentions that when the NY Times breaks a story into more than one page, the number of people who click through to the second page is dramatically lower than the number of people who view the first page. If the demand for high-quality NY Times stories drops off so much after just one click, I hate to think about the click-elasticity of demand for Top 25 Blogs lists.

Of course all this is driven by the traditional publishers’ revenue model, and Time is not the first website to publish a “Top X of Y” list spread across X different pages. They get revenue from advertisers based on the number of pageviews that they generate. So they have this incentive to split things up across pages. This is understandable, but I wonder if 26 pages really is more valuable than one page, given that not many people will click through, and those who do will be so exhausted from clicking that they won’t even look at the ads.