Dec 14 2006
MySpace Passes Yahoo! in Page Views
Thanks to the popularity of MySpace, Yahoo was dethroned as the top site in November:
Social network MySpace drove parent Fox Interactive Media past typical leader Yahoo in number of page views in November, a Web metrics firm says.
Fox Interactive had 39.53 billion page views last month, while Yahoo had 38.05 billion, comScore Networks said Wednesday. As an indication of the impact of MySpace, Fox Interactive in November 2005, which is before parent News Corp. acquired MySpace, had 231 million page views from all its properties.
Of course, Yahoo does not see things the same way:
Yahoo argued that it had lost the top spot in terms of page views because it increasingly uses the latest “Web 2.0″ technology that did not need to spawn as many new pages to display Web information, a spokeswoman said.
ClickZ, an Internet marketing company, went a little further:
Be clear: this does not indicate MySpace and FIM are “biggest” online, whatever that means. Page views are a far from reliable measurement of success for a Web publisher. They fluctuate month to month for any site, and the advent of AJAX site navigation, which Yahoo has embraced in its mail app, reduces their number by not generating a new “view” for every click.
AJAX is a web technology that pushes new content out to web sites without “reloading” the page. Basically, the page gives you new information, but does not count as another page view. Cool for the user, not cool for the company counting the views.
LostRemote has this to say:
True enough, this is one of the biggest issues facing web developers today: AJAX improves usability but decreases page views. In fact, the Internet Advertising Bureau has urged both major web analytics companies to consider reforming its measurement practices to either account for partial refreshes or come up with a new metric for page views.
What strikes me in all of this discussion is something that has been around with the Internet since the first web pages. How do you accurately measure the success of anything on your site? Is it traffic, click-through rates, duration on the site, ad views, or something else? What is certain is this; what we think of success today will be pointless tomorrow.
