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?
I’m not sure what you’re getting at.
The comment I replied to said that maybe the “read more” button is an effort to conserve bandwidth by only sending half the text.
I said that the text is such a tiny portion of the bandwidth required to transmit a web page that it wouldn’t make sense to try conserving it by only sending half.
You’re absolutely correct in that only sending images on the visible part of the page is a common way to conserve bandwidth.