On an Internet powered by video, page views are passe
There as a lot of commotion yesterday about MySpace's page view count passing Yahoo.[1] But that metric means a whole lot less today than it did six to eighteen months ago.
Why? Because new page display technologies and the growth of multimedia have actually caused the number of pages needed per viewing session to decrease. Yahoo, to take a common example, rejiggered its home page this year to display more information without the need for a page refresh (and corresponding extra page view). MySpace, on the other hand, is built in such a manner that requires a new page to load every time you click a button. Some people call the site a "click factory."
Yahoo made sure to warn reporters and investors about this dynamic back in May when they were planning to launch their new site. And Steve Rubel recently predicted an ad shakeout as Web properties move away from the page view metric.
Add video to this mix and it gets more complicated. If a site, such as CNET TV or the New York Times, offers multiple videos per page, and the audience watches each video in turn, a better measure of their engagement with the site would be "average time per user."
This is only to say that advertisers need to judge site performance by a more robust metric than simple page views. Unique visitors, time spent on site, video loads and load times and heat maps are only growing in importance.
FWIW, my headline for this post reminds me of a good Dandy Warhols video:
[1] A page view is the measure of how many times a complete HTML page is requested and loaded. This is different from hits, which refers to the number of times individual files within a page (such as JPEGs and GIFs) are loaded.
