2007: The End Of The Page View

Recently there was 'big news', Myspace had passed Yahoo! in monthly page views. I put the words big news in quotes because it really wasn't as big news as it was made out to be.

It's common wisdom that Myspace is designed to generate a ton of page reloads every session. And social networks are always going to generate a lot of page views per session. People like to check other people out.

But there's even more to the story. Yahoo! revamped its mail service (which may be responsible for a third of its total pageviews) to use an ajax front end. What does that mean? Ajax and other dynamic html technologies allow a page to change content without a reload. So Yahoo!'s mail pageviews are down and that's going to have an impact on Yahoo!'s page view growth.

I've been on the board of comScore since its formation in 1999 and have been lucky to occupy a front row seat to observe the dynamics of the Internet measurement debate. Since Internet measurement became a business in the mid 90s, page views have always been front and center in the world of Internet measurement. And for a good reason, a page view meant another ad view, maybe another three or four ad views depending on how many ads are on the page.

But there are changes afoot in the Internet measurement business. Everyone is recognizing that pageviews matter less now. Ajax and other more modern web technologies allow for new ads to be diisplayed without a page reload. Ad views can grow even as page views decline. I know that there have been a number of discussions about this at the highest levels of the leading Internet measurement firms and the leading Internet businesses. And we'll be seeing the outcomes of those discussions at some point in 2007.

But it doesn't even stop there. Web pages themselves are changing, moving from pages controlled by publishers to pages controlled by users. I have no idea what percentage of total Internet pages viewed in the month of December are "controlled by users" (I'd love a number on that if anyone has it), but I am sure that percentage is increasing. I'd put some, but not all, social networking pages in this category. All blogs for sure. And the growing category of personalized start pages (Google, MyYahoo, Netvibes, etc) is a big part of this trend.

What do users put on these pages they control? 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. If you want to do a deep dive into the world of widgets, I'll send you to Ivan Pope's year end wrapup. He covers most of the interesting things happening on this front. Here are a couple quotes from that post:

The Bite Sized Web, 'I think we're going to start to see an interesting side effect on web pages and blogs as content and services become more granular. Content providers, the Yahoo!'s, AOL's, publishers, magazines etc., will start to provide their content, in a dynamic form, for placement on other web pages.

and

Evan Williams of Odeo calls for the abolition of pageviews because 'The web is becoming increasingly widgetized—little bits of functionality from one site are displayed on many others.

Evan takes this post back to where it began. The big reason that 2007 will mark the end of page views is that pages are not really pages anymore. They are the delivery payload for any number of web services that load with the page.

MyBlogLog said in the middle of December that they are getting 1 million widgets displayed per day. Some of those widget impressions came from this blog. But the same page view that delivered the MyBlogLog widget also delivered a last.fm widget, a flickr badge, an Indeed jobroll, and a bunch of other web services to my readers. The bottom line is a page view isn't a page view anymore. It's a lot more and a lot less. And we are going to come up with new measurement terms in 2007 that recognize this fact.

Comments

[Hooman Radfar]

Fred, I agree that widget analytics is a ripe area. As you know, several bloggers, such as Steve Rubel and Evan Williams have been discussing the same topic, citing the atomization of the web as a major contributor to the death of the page view. That being said, what metrics do you think make sense in a widgetized world? My company is currently tracking a slew of metrics. Some of the reports that we surface shed light on views, locations, viral hubs, etc. But we also have data on interaction time, click-through, etc. Given that there are so many metrics that can be gathered, what do you think will be the most important metrics as the transition continues? I am posing this same question on my blog, Widgify. If I get any interesting comments, I will let you know. Happy Holidays!

[Erik Schwartz]

Another place that is a real opportunity are better metrics for discrete temporal media.

Downloads are not a terribly useful metric.

How many times a piece of media is initiated is interesting. How many consumers consume the entire piece of media is interesting. But a person who consumes the first 10 seconds of a chunk of media and then bails out is very different than a consumer who watches all but the last 10 seconds of the ending credits.

[Hooman Radfar]

Erik, good thoughts. Believe me, the media folks we talk to agree. That type of paradigm works well with games, or video because they are interaction-intensive. That being said, what about widgets that are primarily read only that I use and look at every single day? For instance, what about a weather widget? I may read it and love it every single day, but never click it - ever. Know what I mean? It is a tough cookie. Maybe the answer is that different "mobile" media types should be assessed differently.

[Markus]

Another stats that has serious problems is UNique visitors. For dating sites its funny to see sites with couple of million unique visitors a month and 30 second average session time ranked ahead of sites with lower unique visitor count but a average session time of 30 minutes. Spam, PPC and all kinds of other traffic sharing are really distorting things.

I think a new metric needs to be pushed to the forfront. Average Session Time Per Unique visitor. Also Average Pageviews per user. There is no point in ranking sites by UNique Visitors, or raw pageviews as it provides no context.

[Rob D]

Couldn't agree more, I feel it's moving more towards the one aspect of the TV model = length of exposure (15 sec, 30 sec spot) with the measurability of the Internet (someone actually loaded the page).

The question I have is whether the current adserver companies can quickly change their platforms to serve and report on an exposure metric (time).

[Craig Danuloff]

As you suggest it's not so much that the page view isn't relevant (although it does need an update) as it can't be thought of as the single metric that tells the story of the web. Traffic, sites (and the pages that comprise them), content chunks, and people must all be measured and reported on separately and in relation to each other to really get a picture of what's going on here. Current analytics and metrics are taking an old view and trying to stretch it to cover too much new ground. Smells like an opportunity but I hope we don't have to wait too long until someone really attacks it.

A longer version of these thoughts is in this blog post.

[charlie crystle]

thx, craig. I am not an expert, clearly, but isn't tracking widgets the same as tracking an ad image, or a pixel image? widgets almost invariably reside in part or whole on the providers' servers, which track each request, ajax or no.

[John Furrier]

Yes - pages view are dying finally. It is so flawed...

[Nic Brisbourne]

Great post Fred. I'm struck by a couple of thoughts:

1. Widgetisation could worsen the separation between value and revenue.

2. Companies probably need to start to define their own metrics - and explain why they are right for them. There will be problems with this (not least comparability) but these problems are not new - circulation has always been only one of many relevant measures for a magazine.

[leafar]

I'am also using "root" myware and the most page view on my history are "widget calling pages" like google.adsense or lastfm.
It's not a number for the all web but using myware it's easy to get a picture for this king of thing.
Great post and I think we'll have great discussion about it in 2007. For example you are not allowed to relaod ads from google when you do an action in an ajax page.... advertising is lagging behind this change

[Dan Malven]

Lots of relevant stuff here, but online media metrics are only the tail, and they don't wag the dog anymore. The dog is advertising revenue, and that will drive what metrics are used. But the reality is that decision-making on where to buy online ad space doesn't change very quickly, so I'm not convinced that metrics will change quickly either...even though they "should" in a perfect world. PVs and UVs will likely still be used just because they provide comparability. Even if they become less accurate proxies to what ad buyers really want to know, they might persist just because there are no better universally used proxies. Hopefully better metrics will become universally used but I think it will take a long time. That's my prediction for 2007...

[Dustin]

I agree, but I wonder how Google will adapt since we all have to get indexed somehow.

[prescott]

Will a move away from pageviews hurt smaller sites? Currently, less trafficked sites can benefit from a "run of network" media buy, something done easily when simply looking at ad impressions/pageviews. If further analysis is needed for each individual site based on a more complex criteria, media buyers may not find it worth the trouble, and solely focus on the "big guys".

[Mark Brandon]

Widgetization and Ajax have far more reaching consequences. Consider that most of the very largest content sites are still charging advertisers on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis. These sites won't go to PPC (pay per click) because they know that pageviews has become increasingly irrelevant. As an advertiser, your rates over the last few years have gone up while the effectiveness has plummeted. The few (and I mean very few) sites where I've run on CPM had barely 1 in 3,000 click throughs. Google and Yahoo still seem to thing that a 1 - 5 percent click through (30 to 150 times what I've been able to achieve) is a reasonable benchmark.

I invented some widgets for bloggers which help cross-pollinate blog traffic and help a paying customer achieve link popularity, too. Some examples are at http://sustainablelog.com/feedoms.htm

Mark
http://www.viralinks.com

[Adnan]

Well, page views were very coarse but reasonable metric. With the Internet technologies starting to come out of the infancy, more and more refined metrics will become relevant. There wouldn't of course be a single set of universal metrics applicable to all types of sites/models. Different models/contexts will dictate the relevant metrics in rather intuitive ways.

[larry]

The death of "page views" flies in the face of occam's razor: advertising value=eyeballs=page views. Changing to "ad views" is a hairy eyeball, rife with issues; just note the change of Nielsen TV program ratings vs. ad spot & pod ratings.

Also, the inherent assumption being made -- that "complex accuracy" is preferable to "universal assumptions" -- is contrary to the behavior and common practices of the advertising industry. To elucidate: hits are still widely accepted 10 years later; ads sent by the server are considered as viewed; consumer panels and logs are equal/equivalent to ad server logs; latency vis ad serving does not matter in broadband; everyone surfs with cookies enabled with up-to-date browsers and flash plug-ins to view the ads.

Net, I think the piling-on of technology like Ajax and widgets simply complicates the movement toward properly valuing the consumer experience no matter whose views used.

[Dean]

Speaking from the sales side of things, luckily the pageview metric isn't going away anytime soon. Though the 800lb gorillas set the pace, the trickle down effect always takes its sweet 'ol time. The sheer volume of organizations that are still wrapping their hands around the pageview metric and selling it as a value, successfully, is thick. Thick like molasses. Additionally, many of the clients they deal with are right there in the thick of things. My fear is the growth of the programming technologies will outpace that of the metrics and value establishing parameters of sales and "success".

[David Mosk]

‎100% Free Jewish Dating Online! http://www.Catch4Catch.com/ is a Jewish ONLY website, beautifully designed with a FREE Mobile Version too, just for JEWISH SINGLES! Visit: www.Catch4Catch.com and JOIN NOW FOR FREE!