The article on a polar bear shot in Iceland is also about migrations patterns of mammals in the far north Atlantic. So someone is reading it for the subject rather than the story may like it.

Their metrics are for “articles viewed”, not “articles that the reader read and enjoyed”.

They don’t care if you get bored halfway through, they probably don’t even care if you read the article. As long as the numbers for the money metrics go up, they’re happy.

The BBC does not run ads, and as far as I'm aware does not use any sort of metric you described. It is tax-payer funded service. What they have been doing is copying "features" from other popular news websites, i.e. Buzzfeed, and been integrating them into their own. I appreciate the fact they copied the "suggested articles" feature. I just don't think they considered it long enough to question as to why other websites put the articles half way through and not at the bottom...

While I generally agree with what you said, they do track metrics, and that is one part of how the BBC decides how to spend it's money. If their articles online got a 10th of the traffic they would probably get a lot less money to write those articles. Public service is only useful if people consume it even if it should not optimize for that metric alone (or even primarily).

So the people who fund them are happy to just have the money go into a hole and... then what? They definitely have metrics. How do they know which journalists are writing good articles? How do they know which topics to write about?