Page views were once the standard by which the popularity and sway of Web sites was measured, but that is all changing now with the emergence of Web 2.0, and AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript) in particular. Many sites now contain pages that do not require a refresh to display new content, and that is becoming a problem for sites that attempt to rank the busiest Web sites.
This has led to comScore’s announcement of its plans to roll out a new-and-improved set of metrics to take AJAX sites into account. This statement was made about a week after the site proclaimed that MySpace surpassed Yahoo! as the page view leader on the Internet.
This claim has raised some eyebrows, and understandably so. Yahoo! has been implementing AJAX programming into its homepage this year, and this move has probably been detrimental to its page view-based ranking.
It is precisely this problem that comScore is aiming to eliminate from its ranking metrics.
“The recent decline reported by comScore in Yahoo! Sites page views underscores another emerging issue in the Web metrics measurement industry. New technologies such as AJAX – which enable real-time site updates without needing to refresh a page – are impacting the relevance of page views as an accurate measure of the intensity of consumers’ Internet usage,” the site said in its statement.
President and CEO of comScore Networks, Dr. Magid Abraham, expanded on this and said, “The Internet experience today is much more dynamic thanks to Web 2.0 technologies like AJAX. While page views will not altogether cease to be a relevant measure of a site’s value, it’s clear that there is an increasing need to consider page views alongside newer, more relevant measures… We will be introducing these new metrics to the industry in 2007.”
There are a variety of possible implications in this issue. For one, rankings for big sites could be shaken up a bit after these new metrics are applied. Related to this, sites that take a significant hit in their ranking could see a related hit to their bottom line as advertisers will probably take a step back from spending as much money on placements on those sites.
Secondly, sites that opted to steer clear from AJAX-type programming in its pages for fear of losing ground in its rankings will probably re-consider once the new metrics system is in place.
Thirdly, other Web site ranking companies will probably follow comScore’s lead, if they haven’t already started on their way towards this end.
Sources:
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-
20061227ComScoreToIntroduceNewMetricsIn2007.html
http://www.betanews.com/article/ComScore_to_Change_
Web_Site_Metrics/1166554847
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061225-8493.html
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