Page Views Dead Metric
Posted Dec 24, 2006 @ 5:13 pm, Viewed by 612 Visitors, Read 628 Times.Pageviews, the metric most webmasters have long used to measure a website's popularity, may be dead, according to Peter Dabolt, Chief of Insights in Yahoo! Opinions, Trends & News.
There was a time in the mid-90's when a page hit was the measurement most used to measure site popularity, but as pages grew and hits multiplied (multiple server hits to load a single page), that metric fell out of favour. Since that time page views and unique visits have been the two most important logs webmasters use to measure their site's popularity.
Not that there's ever been a standardized way to measure page views: Are bots and spiders supposed to be counted? Does a page view occur after a request, or does the page need to be fully loaded?
This dilemma has become even more complicated over the last year or so with the advent of FLASH and AJAX *Asynchronous JavaScript and XML*(see link below for more info on AJAX). AJAX allows different content to be viewed without ever calling for a page update.
All of which mean Page Views are a metric on the way out.
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Morgan - I would agree with you that any webmaster (siteowner) who's offerings don't use AJAX will continue to rely on Pageviews as the metric of choice, but the point made above was that these technologies will make PV's far less important (obviously for sites using them).
You are correct that most folks cannot spell let alone use AJAX. I don't think we are at the point of irrelevance yet. My current thinking is that pageviews (in order to be relevant) must have a couple of other qualifying metrics alongside (sessions and unique visitors) to TRULY define and quantify the traffic a site recieves. For example: If you have x number of pageviews generated by y sessions done by z unique visitors, then you have an absolute idea of the reach, depth and bredth of a website. Still, i think folks will use pageviews as a quick and dirty reference, but the smart ones should check under the hood. (grin)
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I think for the most part this theory is a little ahead of it's time, although AJAX usage exists, it is far from being a standard in web development, in fact most developers could not even begin to explain what AJAX is or how to use it. So saying that new technology is effecting page views as a metric is not really accurate, at least not at this point.