The Page View is Officially Dead

As predicted late last year, the page view is officially irrelevant. Nielsen is no longer measuring sites this way thanks to widgets and online video. ComScore needs to follow next. Further, both companies need to open up their auditing process across The Long Tail.

Comments

[Chip Griffin]

I agree that page views are problematic, but time seems like an absurd measurement as well -- and one that is equally problematic, if not more so. I note that they will credit AOL for time spent instant messaging on AIM. But how many of us have multiple windows popped up at once and hop back and forth? How the heck do you count that time? If I've got this post up and need to find a link or look something up. Or if I get sidetracked by an IM or an email or phone call.

Again, not a defense of the page view, I have just always found time to be an extraordinarily hard to measure metric. And not even one that it is easy to match up between a company's logs and the the third parties like Nielsen or ComScore. At least I can look at my logs and figure out if page views are even in the right neighborhood. How do you do that with time where the algorithms may differ?

[Friendly Ghost]

Hi Steve,

Gathering stats that not only make sense but actually agree with each other is a real pain. There can be wild variations between what Google 'sees' and what Yahoo 'sees', or there can be more accurate and yet smaller populations for example from Alexa or Bloglines. It's a real mess, and one I've been trying to untangle for some time (see http://thefriendlyghost.wordpress.com/2007/06/23/the-friendly-ghost-powerpr-index-for-june-2007/).

To add to your list of companies trying to do this (http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/03/we_need_auditin.html) there is Onalytica who get around the problem of tracking influence by using input/output matrix analysis and automatic sentiment measurement (see http://thefriendlyghost.wordpress.com/2007/06/11/blog-influence-talking-with-flemming-madsen-of-onalytica/). However it would still be fantastic if someone could define and develop a real standard by which blogs are measured.

Or perhaps this is the problem with a Long Tail? Perhaps the content at the head is so radically different in nature from that at the tail that no metric could ever encompass them all?

Regards
Friendly Ghost

[Daniel R]

"Nielsen's rival, comScore Media Metrix, also has addressed the rise of Ajax with the development of site "visits" — defined as the number of times a person returns to a site with a break of at least a half-hour."

Curious, hasnt that definition of a "visit" been true with IAB for a number of years now?

[Irina Missiuro]

Hi, Steve,
We just posted an article on our site that relates to your post. It discusses better ways to measure Web 2.0. Here's the link:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30038
You can access the story until July 17th.

[Scott Bauman]

Steve,
I know you've written about Compete before. Just wanted to be sure you remember that Compete has been hip to "attention" for some time. It's NNR and ComScore that are catching up...

Check out this post on the Compete blog http://blog.compete.com/2007/04/02/attention-daily-new-metrics/

[Jeremy Kandah]

I think this is probably one of the best things to happen to the web since RSS. The page view has been limiting the way of developing web applications. I believe that by removing this statistic we can finally see applications that work better and don't try to extract more page views from users.

[Ryan Wagner]

I've been trying to figure out how pageviews didn't die a long time ago. As soon as Web 2.0 sites started popping up the pageview measuring should have been kicked out the door.