Evan Williams, the CEO of Odeo, has an interesting post on the ‘value’ of pageviews w.r.t. a site. He argues that pageviews and hit counts have become obsolete, as they don’t tell you much.
He sites the example of the Odeo homepage and says that one visit to such a page would count as many as 40 hits if viewed through a browser with graphics display turned on. The reason he gives this example is that some sites with lesser hits may have equal usage and maybe even more. A clumsy design may be a big factor in determining the number of pageviews. So pageview analysis are absolutely meaningless.
He also tries to deflate the MySpace balloon by saying that MySpace by citing Mike Davidson’s analysis where he says that the amazing numbers that MySpace shows are due to its crappy design.
Even Alexa Rank is a combination of Reach + Pageviews, but it is not the final solution. Evan says that there is no easy solution to know what data can provide authentic analysis. He ends as;
In summary, there’s no easy solution. There’s a big opportunity (though very tough job) for someone to come up with a meaningful metric that weighs a bunch of factors. But no matter what, there will come a time when no one who wants to be taken seriously will talk about their web traffic in terms of “pageviews” any more than one would brag about their “hits” today.
If you have any idea on a kind of solution that will provide the best solution to this problem, please share with us.
Read Evan’s post here.
