Commentary

From MediaPost Raw: Death Of The Page Views

Are page views still a meaningful metric? No, says a somewhat surprising source--Lynn Bolger, who, until six weeks ago, served as an executive at page-view happy comScore. "There are still big issues with the page view," said Bolger, now vice president, ad and sales insights at Yahoo. "I actually think it should be dead."

If page views are dying, what will replace them? Chris Marentis, CEO of Clearspring, said marketers and publishers need to find some way to integrate traditional Web site metrics with other analytics that follow pieces of content as they make their way around the Web. After all, today, text, photos, music and video all get separated from their Web sites of origin, as users embed clips or articles in blogs, social networking sites or e-mails.

Konrad Feldman, CEO of Quantcast, said he favors conducting a census. He suggested that relying on panel data is imprecise, when, theoretically, every piece of content that's viewed online can be associated with the viewers' IP addresses.

But conducting a census would require that publishers agree to add code to their sites, allowing them to be tracked--which doesn't seem likely. "One of the fundamental challenges it that you've got to herd up all the cats in the industry and get everyone to agree to be tracked," Yahoo's Bolger said. "And I happen to know of one large site that wouldn't like that."

Read more coverage of OMMA Hollywood at MediaPost Raw: Live and Unadulterated.

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