Last year MySpace passed Yahoo! in the number of monthly page views. Many a pundit cited this as yet another example of the death of Yahoo! at the hands of Google. In fact, it reflected just the opposite. Yahoo! has been changing its site to make it more consumer friendly and easier to use. The only casualty was the old way of measuring a site.
Yes, the page view is dying. And new technologies emerging out of Web 2.0, such as AJAX, RSS, and widgets, are hastening its demise.
In recent years, the page view has become the standard way to measure the relative popularity of a digital property and a basis for pricing online media. Those who rely on advertising inventory for revenue should be concerned, but those who care deeply about the quality of user experiences should be thrilled.
AJAX is reason number one for the death of the page view. Up until last year or so, Web designers were largely stuck with the same basic page-by-page HTML model that has been around since the first days of the Web. But that’s all changed with the widespread adoption of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). AJAX enables the next generation of Websites and applications, where all user activity happens in one single “page.” You can check e-mail, get directions, pay bills, and watch as many videos as you like without ever refreshing the page – and that means no additional page views.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is another major factor. It was designed to let you receive content from publishers or blogs and read it in special readers – all without ever actually having to visit those Websites. Now, with Microsoft incorporating RSS into the new Internet Explorer and Windows Vista, RSS has gone mainstream. In the near future, the notion of actually having to visit a Website, let alone a page, will become antiquated. RSS may even become the mechanism for video distribution, allowing consumers to subscribe to traditional television shows without ever having to channel surf (or Web surf) again.
Widgets are another nail in the page-view coffin. “Newsweek” has declared ’07 as the year of the widget, and with good reason. Widgets are primarily JavaScript or Flash file interface elements, like text boxes or windows. You can download widgets – or gadgets – to your desktop to monitor stock portfolios, weather, photos, news, and a good deal more. The Mac OS and Windows Vista support widgets, but the biggest growth will be in widgets incorporated into Web pages. YouTube, with its video streams plastered across the Web, is the most prominent example. Photo streams from Flickr provide another example. And advertisers such as Volkswagen and Purina are jumping into the fray by sponsoring downloadable desktop applications.
Widgets signal a whole new way of experiencing the Web. We’ll no longer be constrained to “pages” but can experience any type of application in any environment at any time.
So, let’s return to my initial example of MySpace and Yahoo!. Yahoo! has been leveraging AJAX to dramatically improve its customer experience, most prominently to allow users to check their inboxes on Yahoo! Mail, thereby negating millions upon millions of “page views.” The more crudely designed MySpace takes a different tack, requiring multiple page views by users to complete relatively simple tasks.
Page views vs. efficient consumer experiences. Which would you prefer? Which would your customer prefer?
New metrics for user engagement
This year we expect savvy marketers to start replacing the page view with statistics such as reach, frequency, and time spent on site. We also believe user-initiated metrics, such as subscriptions to RSS feeds and widgets, will play a bigger role.
And look for two more big shifts:
* AJAX metrics and time-based ad serving. Analytic tools already can measure AJAX interactions by monitoring the number of AJAX requests to a server (known as events), which allows us to infer interactivity. That’s still not a replacement for the page-view metric, however. Instead, look for the AJAX measurement to trigger time-based ad serving–that is, the serving of ads (which refresh) over a given span of time. This seems like a much more appropriate tactic given the sheer amount of time that users spend consuming audio and video online today.
* User-participation metrics. The rise of social networks such as MySpace and social media such as Digg and del.icio.us took the world by storm last year. Look for 2007 and 2008 to bring a host of new ways to measure how users are actively engaging with a digital property. From counting “posts” (comments on a page) to quantifying submissions of content/media (such as audio or video) to a given site, this year will see a number of new metrics associated with the social Web. After all, isn’t the property that causes the most conversation (or interaction) truly the most popular?
If history has taught us anything, it’s that the only constant in this industry is change. So join me in bidding the page view a fond farewell and get ready to embrace what’s next.
Dave Friedman is president of the central region for Avenue A | Razorfish, a Seattle-based interactive services firm, and a monthly contributor to CHIEF MARKETER. Contact him at Dave.Friedman@avenuea-razorfish.com.
Other articles by Dave Friedman:
Five Things Every Marketer Should Know About Digital in 2007
Interactive Video: The Heart of Digital Marketing
Actionable Analytics: Some Advanced Applications
Actionable Online Analytics for Marketing Success
Are You a New-Media Marketing Maven?
Young and Restless: Tips for Reaching Teens Online
Finding the Hispanic American Online
Decoding Digital Footprints with Analytics to Better Understand Consumers
Offline Research for the Online World
Social Media: Four Crucial Mentality Shifts for Marketers
Social Media: Out of Control, on Target, and Changing the Rules
Digital Media, Collaborative Thinking, and the Whole-Brained Approach
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