I have always been a believer of the theory that page impressions do not mean much. However, with the new Web 2.0 phenomenon, whatever relevance page impressions have or had is fading away fast.
E-consultancy has a very valid article on the relevance of page impressions. It rightly says that with the Web 2.0 thingy in, Internet should be measured more like broadcast media than press media where page impression might have little relevance.
Let us see why this is irrelevant now.
a) Sometime back, I cited Odeo boss Evan Williams’ blogpost on why pageviews give an incorrect data. Crappy designs or manipulation of the pages by splitting them into sub-pages, menus or having a large number of graphics will give a much higher number of impressions in a page. So the popularity of such crappy or manipulated websites can never be measured so simply by taking into account the pageviews only. MySpace boasts of so many pageviews just because of its crappy design and loads of graphics. Having said that, I am not implying that MySpace is not a popular site.
b) How do you measure flash sites? There is no simple way how you can measure a site like this.
Now with Web 2.0 tools like AJAX, designers are presenting sites in a highly synchronous way. For example, while you can be in such a page for several minutes, you still can request updates without moving away from the page or reloading the entire page. This means you are in the same page while generating a stream of hits. The article in E-consultancy rightly says that ‘how many hits and how long a page is viewed will be purely down to how it has been designed technically’.
So, if a site boasts of a certain number of hits or pageviews or page impressions, it would be like a meaningless banter. The sooner we change our mindsets as how we should take the Internet to be, the closer to the truth we shall be; and the truth is that Internet is more like a broadcast media and not print.
