Steve Rubel writes about "The Imminent Demise of the Page View", pointing out that more modern websites with their fancy Ajax and Flash implementations don't require multiple page views in order to provide content and interactivity. In a world where the page view is the metric by which many (most?) online agencies measure success, what comes next? How much slower will the rollout of user-friendly, immersive, interactive implementations be since the agency world has strong financial incentives to delay the inevitable?
Clearly we need to start looking at other actionable items, such as content delivery or purchase. It's going to have to be more specific to the goals of the individual company. Given that, how do we come up with a universal metric to show relative success between different websites? If I want to buy media, for example, and I'm comparing two sites and one has twice the page views of another, but the one with the fewer page views is much more compelling and interactive and is clearly hurt in the page view metric by its advanced user interface, which one do I go with?
This is important for our clients and I'll be watching closely to see what the industry starts to push as a new standard.
As an example, Steve writes in "Watch Videos Without Leaving the Google Homepage" about the example of Google now allowing people to watch Google videos without leaving the Google viewer. Net/net this will decrease page views to sites that house these videos. However, the content from these sites is still be watched. Clearly the page view is lessening as a valid metric.
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