In the Ajax age, the pageview is a dying metric
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 10 July 2007 at 15:22
Tags: ABCe, Ajax, Nielsen, metrics, video
In the latest move in the eternal debate about the most appropriate metrics for measuring web sites’ readership, the Internet market research firm Nielsen/Netratings has added new time-based metrics to its profiles.
The Internet market research firm has added “total minutes” and “total sessions” alongside existing “average time per person” and “average number of sessions per person” to the metrics it records for web sites.
Because of the growing use of technologies that allow users to obtain large amounts of information from a single page, online pundits have long been predicting “the death of the pageview” as an online media metric. This certainly appears to be another step in that direction.
Ajax-based web development is allowing content to be refreshed while users remain on a single page. Playing a streaming audio or video file also provide far more user engagement than the single pageview they record would suggest.
The pageview metric “under-credits such engagement”, Nielsen/Netratings said in a statement today. By contrast, a time-based metrics allow a measurement of user engagement that is independent of the technologies used in different sites’ design.
The big winners when applying the new metrics are web-based instant messenger applications, multimedia players, and social networking sites with large, loyal user base.
Among news sites, a shift time-based metrics rewards news organizations like CNN, whose recent Ajax-heavy redesign probably sacrificed pageviews for usability. Its tabbed story pages allow users to move between different media while remaining on the same page.
Hopefully de-emphasising pageviews will discourage bad design practices developed to inflate pageview figures, such as linear photo galleries where dozens of pictures are posted on separate pages with buttons herding users through endless refreshes. Good riddance.
See also: Shane Richmond at Telegraph.co.uk.
