Are pageviews obsolete? Evan Williams thinks so…
Blogger founder Evan Williams states that pageviews are obsolete.
I’m not sure that I agree with him entirely on this – unique pageviews still drive ad sales and most of the metrics that are out there for public consumption.. but the widgetization of the web and the ongoing growth of syndication technologies will make pageviews less and less important.
The best measurement for me when looking at a blog – but unfortuantely it’s so nebulous and difficult to get at – is to see if its profitable or not..
Because you can have all of the pageviews in the world.. all of the reach and growth in the world.. and all of the passion you need to be a successful blogger..
But if you’re not at least breaking even.. you’ll be out in the boneyard with the ohters that failed…
I think this is what drove advertisers to a more better model for a return on their investment; who cares if a website has a bajillion unique visitors.
If I was a prospective advertiser what I ultimately care about — and you’re bang on — is how many widgets am I going to sell if I spend whatever amount of dollars on your website.
The incidental number of eyeballs which pass through are almost irrelevant; they serve as a surrogate for the number of click throughs, which serve as a surrogate for how many “actions” are taken, which serve as a surrogate for all KINDS of things — but ultimately, its a surrogate for sales.
That’s why I thought advertisers post web1.0 bubble were moving away from pageviews all that sort of nonesense and moving towards, at least, pay per click marketing … that way you’d only really pay for clicks on your banner (or paid search) rather than just a viewing.
And ultimately, I thought it was evolving into pay per “action” — not even concerned with clicking through on your banner … but with whatever they do after — newsletter signup, freebie signup, download a free music track or whatever.
Well far for it for the web2.0 to learn from the lessons of the first bubble …
… after all, we’ll always have dead2.0 (which is really an evolution of the fuckedcompany) … :)
Cheers
t @ dji
And a media company may have other publishing interests outside its Web presence. If these are linked in and cross-fertilizing it becomes impossible to decide on the value of a network from it’s face in pixels.
It would be nice to have a measurment that valued a site on grammer, interaction with commenters, regular updates (whether weekly, daily, monthly etc) and above all the content.
I would like to see companies/individuals etc sponsor websites simply through a logo placement on a blog. This kind of sponsorship paid per month or better per year or bi-monthly could be ideal for many long-tail bloggers. I need to think on this more but wouldn’t it be cool if companies (big ones) realized that they could gain by supporting bloggers who perhaps use their product or post about it a lot. This wouldn’t be a pay-per-post type thing. It would just be a static logo that stays put for agiven amount of time. There are so many products that people do not purchase online but research online or could be simply reminded (targeted) by a simple logo placement.