Page views have long been the metric of choice for measuring the ad potential of web sites. It's not hard to understand that with every page view comes a group of ads, so the more pages you serve, the more ads you serve. It's a perfect correlation. However, 2006 has seen some significant changes in this trusty correlation due to new interactive web design that doesn't depend on full page refreshes to display information.

Scott Fulton of BetaNews takes a look at this has led to MySpace passing Yahoo to become the #1 site on the web for page views. As Fulton explains, this may have more to do with Yahoo's use of AJAX than MySpace's growth:

"ComScore's estimate is that Yahoo's page views declined by 3.5 million in a one month period alone, even though experts in the field of Web design have been arguing since last spring that deploying AJAX reduces the efficiency of analytics software.

That didn't stop Fox Interactive, the parent of MySpace, from touting what it calls 200% year-over-year growth, as evidenced mainly by page view estimates from comScore Media Metrix and Nielsen/NetRatings. Experts point out that MySpace does not use AJAX."

I wrote about this issue back in May in a post titled, "How Does AJAX Web Design Effect Ad Revenue" which included this graph from Mike Davidson illustrating the impact AJAXifying MySpace could have on their pageviews:


So, making a few changes to MySpace could make the site faster to navigate, but also reduce page views. Is that a good thing? It depends. A site that's efficient for users may take less page views to accomplish the same goals, whether it's reading email, navigating photos, or browsing profiles in the case of MySpace. But what if your ad inventory is sold on a page view basis? Are you willing to give up that revenue to improve the user experience?


Peter Daboll, Chief of Insights at Yahoo, and former President and CEO of comScore Media Metrix blogged about this recently on a Yahoo corporate blog:

"When you view our new Yahoo! Maps, for example, Ajax allows you to drag the maps around and zoom in and out without having to wait for the page to reload. But for all that convenience, the new experience translates into just one page view. Our users tell us they much prefer the new maps to those of old, so suddenly counting page views seems far less important."

Again, less important based on the user experience, but how do you serve additional ad impressions when someone drags a map to a new location that previously required a page refresh? Daboll explains:

PVs don’t represent ad inventory. In the early days of the Internet, page views were used to represent available ad impressions, but the reality is that page views and ad impressions are actually counted in different ways and don’t correlate. PVs also have little to do with available inventory with the different types of ad units available today using text, audio, video, etc.

It would be nice if that was the case, but page views have a LOT to do with available inventory today. For example, I could create additional page views on this site by:


That would decrease the efficiency of the site, but my ad inventory would increase. It's a trade off. I opt for efficiency in this case. However, there is simply no way to achieve a comparable inventory without those page views.

So, with the meaning of page views changing faster than currently associated ad impressions, what's a publisher to do?