What Will Replace the Almighty Page View?

The page view is on life support. It fails to capture all of the myriad of ways consumers engage in online activities without ever leaving a web page. To get a feel for this, spend some time playing with Yourminis. So what will replace it and when will that happen? Let's handicap the field.

Events

These days most interactive web sites are built using Flash and/or Ajax (a cake mix of Javascript, XML and HTML). Page views are useless here. They only count complete refreshes of a page. Yahoo's page views fell late last year as it increasingly turned to these technologies to power popular products like Yahoo Maps.

Enter "events." Sophisticated web measurement tools, such as Google Analytics, can track every single interaction an individual makes within a page - including Flash and Ajax. Thousands of sites run Google Analytics, so it's conceivable Google can allow users to selectively share data and use it to compile a rankings list. Right now comScore is unable to measure Ajax and Flash events, although they are working on it so the smart money says someone will rush in to do a better job.

Unique Visitors

Another popular metric is unique visitors, which measures individual visitors to a particular site. "Uniques" certainly does not face the same quandary that plagues the page view. So on the surface, it seems reliable. However, it too is fairly dysfunctional.

Unique visitors does not account for the same individual who uses multiple screens. We all use a myriad of computers and devices. Therefore, the counts are completely inaccurate. Then again, the data has always been inaccurate and treats all sites equally. So uniques remains fairly healthy - for now.

Time Spent

With the rise of online video and other rich media, marketers also rely on time spent to measure attention. This is a good metric and it even holds as people interact with embedded video and widgets on whatever platform they choose.

Unfortunately, time spent fails to capture the most engaged users who like to peruse RSS feeds. For example, I subscribe to multiple RSS feeds from the Wall Street Journal but I only click through on those that I want to dig deeper. Still I spend up to 10 minutes a day with my Journal feeds and over an hour a day overall within my Google RSS reader. That time is not accounted for - at least by the Journal, but certainly by Google. There's the dilemma

Which horse is strongest? I would bet on events and time spent to lead the pack.