The page view in web statistics is the number of times a web page is “viewed”. This statistic is used to track your traffic and visitors on your blog or website and a favorite brag for blog owners. Advertisers have been taking page views into account for years, but now modern technology in web page designs are taking away the validity of the page view.
Ajax, Flash, Widgets, and other interactive-non-page-loading functions change content on a web page without the page reloading, which means the visitor may see many changes on the page, but the page view statistic counts only one visit to the page itself.
As more interactive web page designs expand across the web, different site statistics will become more important as a measurement of how a site is “really doing”.
The following articles discuss this more in depth:
- Micro Persuasion – The Imminent Demise of the Page View
- Marketing VOX – Ajax May Undermine Web Advertising Analytics Models
- TechWeb – Ajax Challenges Web Development Leaders — And Web Publishers And Advertisers
- Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik – Five Ecosystem Challenges for Web Analytics Vendors
- Emergence Media – The Future of Analytics and the Fate of Page Centricity
- Weekly Weblog – Page View, Useless?
- The Blog Herald – Where is Online Advertising Heading?
- Cost Per News – Transcending Links in Affiliate Marketing
- ProBlogger – The Death of the Page View and the Ongoing Challenge of Monetizing Websites
Site Search Tags: page view, monetizing, monetization, blog advertising, making money with your blog
Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network
Lorelle on WordPress 
6 Comments
You are presenting a very valuable point here. Many advertisers cannot rely on the page hits anymore, since the hits within a flash application is not registered.
But there are other forms of registering hits/clicks. You can use JavaScript to register the coordinates of a site to see where the users tend to click, or a link parser that parse the links on a site before the link is redirected.
But still, to monitor domain hits (and not page views in general), we can use the old method.
The solution is yet to be discovered.
Even though not all sites are using AJAX et al, page views still present a problem when you take into account RSS feeds. I think a much more valuable metric is ‘content views’, knowing how many times a particular piece of content has been viewed, whether it be on a site, in a feed, or on another site via aggregation.
Of course, advertisers only care about that when the content is the ad. With sites like ReviewMe and more companies incorporating bloggers in product launches, content views will be an increasingly important metric.
Last year, I seemed to have a pretty good source of traffic coming into my site every once in a while, but Site Meter wasn’t agreeing with me. The traffic would come in spurts, with little rhyme nor reason. When I added it to the RSS feed, then it leveled off.
Nowadays, with the way people can repurpose feeds, you have to use something like FeedBurner and hope that’s accurate.
Thanks for the plug, Lorelle.
This is an incredibly fascinating issue which transcends all forms of online marketing (and user experience in general) and has the potential to transform the way money is spent to gather attention for new products, services, platforms, etc.
Great job bringing together all of these various posts!
Sam
I responded to this conversation and well, and you should trust that page views will not be dying any time soon!
http://www.douglaskarr.com/2006/12/02/the-page-view-is-not-dead/
It’s still a requirement of many of the implementations I’m currently working on. We utilize Ajax and rich internet application interfaces where we can, but ultimately, we still adjust for sites focused on advertising models.
Lorelle,
Thanks for mentioning my Emergence-Media post. I’ll be definitely adding you to my RSS Reader.
Cheers,
Daniel
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[…] Lorelle VanFossen has compiled a list of posts on other blogs which describe some of these quiet changes which are slowly spreading across the landscape of online marketing which serve as a great resource for further reading… […]