This reminds me of the "life below 600 px" story from last week [1]. So yes, there is a reason to do multi-page content from that point of view.
Unfortunately, it's used as a cheap trick to smear limited content over pages that are riddled with ads. I hope the folks who promote this realise they're making visitors become immune to ads. Anyone remember that television layout from "Idiocracy"?
Most of these sites will have very detailed monitoring of performance/revenue generated by their ads. In all likelihood they've A/B tested ad impressions, clicks, conversions, and revenue generated by a single-page article versus the same on a paginated article, and discovered that (intuitively) spreading the content out over multiple pages with more opportunities to display ads gives better results. Maybe it's only marginally better, but in the world of online advertising even the tiniest improvement in conversions can mean huge changes in revenue when you throw enough users at it. The fact that some users may be annoyed by or made "immune" to ads is moot. They'll go where the money is.
Unfortunately, it's used as a cheap trick to smear limited content over pages that are riddled with ads. I hope the folks who promote this realise they're making visitors become immune to ads. Anyone remember that television layout from "Idiocracy"?
[1] https://qht.co/item?id=3242670
edit:link