Thursday, December 14th, 2006
Yahoo! comScore lowers due to outdated page view metric
Category: Editorial
There have been a couple of articles on the so called rise of MySpace over Yahoo! in the comScore metrics.
This one is getting beat to death. The notion of Ajax lowering page views as a bad thing is dumb.
- Using Ajax to get more data that users want in a more usable fashion? Good.
- Can you push more targetting better ads using Ajax? You could.
- Do other design choices change page views? Yup. I could change Ajaxian to have less posts per page, or only show a summary forcing users to click through to the full postings (ditto on RSS feeds). We do not do that as that isn’t what users want. Our page views are lower than they could be, but who cares.
4.1 rating from 14 votes
Having a overwhelming amount of page views often indicates one thing: That the site is NOT user friendly!
If you have to clickt trough 10 pages to see all comments of an article, or haveing to click trough 4 categories to find the right article in your favorite online store is just horrible.
Ajax can just make your life so much more comfortable. Having a live search that is being displayed on the same page, or having a nice ajax comment-slider makes a webpage more friendly.
And there are still ways to measure what visitors are watching and requesting on a page using Ajax!
You just have to think differently…
Clearly sites that let you do more with less page views is a better experience, but that misses the point.
The main thing to notice here is that Ajax does not have an acceptable usage measurement that business people can understand. Advertisers who dont understand the benefits of Ajax (and dont want to) will now go to MySpace to advertise on the “biggest site on the internet”.
Remember, in technology, better doesnt always win.
I agree. There really should be something done about the ranking of pages now that AJAX is making the common ‘click a link, load new page’ model to be not very attractive to users. Ajax makes for a better expeience for the users, sure. But what about the servers? When used correctly, Ajax has the potential to greatly reduce server traffic by only sending a full page once, and updating small pieces of the page here and there. With all that’s happened on the web lately, I really do feel that there needs to be a better way of determining real traffic or just plane popularity of a site.