One of the leaders in Internet metrics Nielson Netratings has announce a switch from pageviews to time spent on a site to determine a site's popularity. Technology has evolved, and Ajax technology provides a user experience where more information can be presented to a user without having to redirect them to a new page. The page view metric was called into question when MySpace proclaimed the crown of most visited site last year over perenial leader Yahoo! After looking more carefully at the statistics, the reduction in pageviews was attributed to Yahoo's use of Ajax technologies.
YouTube is another major site which has huge popularity and time spent on network from its users, but does not have the pageviews due to the inherent nature of videos.
This fundamental shift, and reduction in importance of pageviews will accelerate the popular of Ajax and Flash as adoption of these tools will no longer serve as a pageview penalty. In turn, web product managers will focus on ways to keep a user on their site (nothing new here), but will not be driven to generate clicks without a compelling reason. This has interesting implications on Google's PPC (pay per click) model. As user's become less addicted to clicking, it could translate into lower click through rates.
0 comments:
Post a Comment