> I suspect that many sites have the same line of reasoning.
Not your fault, obviously, but FFS: this is the most vapid line of reasoning. If I want to find out more I'm going to leave your site anyway, so surely it's better if I'm not irritated by your lack of citations when I do inevitably go?
Does Wikipedia worry about people leaving and not coming back? No. Do you know why I go back to Wikipedia all the effing time, often using it as a starting point for research? Well, one of the big reasons is that many articles have a decent list of authoritative citations and external links at the bottom that I can use to find out more when I need or want to.
Talk about myopic: even the BBC do this, and it's incredibly frustrating. Absolutely smacks of some clueless senior manager[1] setting up the wrong metrics for measuring site performance.
[1] Manager bashing is a bit of a tired trope here on HN and I'm not trying to make a generalisation but, as with every job, some of them are certainly idiots/clowns.
If the reason they're leaving makes it's more likely they'll come back again in future this may lead to an increase in ad revenue due to more sessions even though average session duration falls.
Obviously I don't know, and unfortunately I've learned not to trust that higher-ups in certain organisations have done their homework on revenue-affecting decisions, but you'd at least hope that they had some data to back up the thinking.
When I asked if it's okay to link to sources, they told me I was allowed to if absolutely necessary. I should try not to because it takes readers away from our site, and they might not come back.
I suspect that many sites have the same line of reasoning.