PageViews are Obsolete
PageTime and Unique Visitors are the Metric
The incumbent metric-of-choice was PageViews
Until now, the key metric in advertising economy, for valuation of websites and how online media is bought and sold, is the Page View.
A Page View or page impression is the request from a surfer to load a single page of an Internet site.
A page request results from a web surfer by clicking on a link on another HTML page pointing to the page in question.
These Page Views are accounted for by Web Analytics Services or installed Software.
Advertisers are interested in the number of Page Views, in order to know the number of times their advertising has been seen. They will use it to determine their expected revenue from the ads.
For this reason it is a term that is widely used for Internet based marketing and advertising.
Currently, most of the large content sites are charging their advertisers on a CPM (Cost Per thousand impressions) basis. These sites won't go to PPC (Pay Per Click), because they know that Page Views have become increasingly irrelevant.
Website technology has changed, thus a need for a new metric.
PageViews problems:
PageViews are not a uniform metric:
However, Page View counts are becoming as susceptible as PPC or hit counts, because of site design decisions, that have nothing to do with actual usage.
As pages consist of files, what exactly are the Page Views ?
For example: Every image in a page is a separate file. When a visitor looks at a page (i.e. a page view), they may see numerous images, graphics, pictures etc. and generate multiple hits.
Difference in use of Websites:
People use a Search Engine differently from a News Page .
On any Search Engine, the goal is to serve people fast, to give what they search for, and they go away. Due to this, the search engines don't drive many page views per visit either. There for as people will visit their Search engine frequently, the aggregate time is probably still high. Whereas, on a News Page, people will stay and read/view items.
Both do count the Page Views, but the impact is different.
Completeness of consumption:
The number of visitors consuming the entire piece of media can be quite different: Some will only consume the first 10 seconds of a chunk of media and then bails out. Which is very different, compared with a consumer watching all, but the last 10 seconds of the ending credits.
Both do count the Page Views, but the impact is different.
PageViews are becoming obsolete:
There are different reasons:
- “Bad” website design.
- Ajax
- User conduct within a single page
- Widgetisation of the web
- RSS / Atom feeds
- User controlled Content
- Multi media
Many examples do exist, where the visitor is required to click too many times to get to another page on the website, thus creating more traffic and more page views, than normally required.
Ajax:
Ajax and other new web technologies, allow for new ads to be displayed without a page reload. The relation between number of times an ad is viewed, and the number of PageViews is not relevant anymore.
User conduct and actions within a single page:
Websites are being built with Ajax, Flash or other interactive technologies, allowing the user to conduct affairs and actions all within a single web page. This eliminates the need to click from one page to another. The visitor stays a long time on the Page, without any reload: no Page View count.
Web Widgetization:
Pages are now made up of widgets, which can operate like multiple pages themselves. These are little bits of functionality from one site, which are displayed on many other Websites.
Again the Visitor stays longer on a single Page, but the content is derived from different sources.
A widget can be loaded in a sidebar of a blog, without anyone paying attention to it. In case of a video, someone can be watching the whole video and probably even an ad, that's something entirely different. But is it a pageview?
Still no page reload, thus no Page View count.
RSS / Atom feeds:
Applications, known as feed readers or aggregators, can check a list of feeds on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that they find.
The feeds bring information or content, such as weblogs, podcasts, vlogs, and mainstream media websites, to the user.
All without any page reload, thus no PageView count.
User Controlled Content:
Web pages themselves are changing, moving from pages controlled by publishers to pages controlled by users.
Blogs and some, but not all, social networking pages are in this category. And the growing category of personalized start pages is a big part of this trend.
What is the Content on these User Controlled Pages? In some cases, they put their own content, but they also put pieces of other web pages on their pages. These "pieces of other web pages" are called widgets, badges, embedded players, and a number of other things as well.
Multi media:
On one PageView, a short or long video can be watched or a song can be listened. The actual part of the content consumed needs to be measured, not the single PageViews, which have no relation to the actual Content used.
Especially, when it comes to media like audio or video, having an increasing percentage of the web consumption, time obviously means a great deal more than a page view.
Conclusion:
The end of pageviews is, because pages are not really pages anymore. They are the delivery payload for any number of web services that load with the page..There for PageTime and Unique visitor are required as metrics.