Piling on pageviews ...

So what constitutes a "meaningful metric" and what doesn't? In other words, are "pageviews" better than "time spent" or vice versa.

It's starting to look like "time" will win out.

First, there was news that Nielsen was junking pageviews as its main metric in determining the most successful sites.

Nielsen is part of a growing number of institutions realizing that with the advent of new technologies, the pageview's value isn't necessarily as important as it once was.

As the New York Times puts it:

Yahoo and others, however, are increasingly using a software trick called Ajax that allows sites to update data automatically and continually, without users needing to pull up new pages. Page views decline as a result.

And then the reaction began to flow in ... most of it excited at the prospect of being freed from the tryanny of the pageview.

Richard MacManus of Read/Write/Web:

Blogs are a good case where 'time spent' is more meaningful than page views. Especially since the blogosphere is particularly prone to the 'quantity over quality' problem. It's easy to pump out 20+ posts a day - and that tactic garners a lot of page views. But are those blogs actually writing for their readers, or writing to get page views? In other words, check the 'time spent on site' figures for those blogs and I think you'd find it is very low - because users click through, find nothing of value, and quickly leave. Is that good for advertisers on those sites? No it isn't. So in the case of blogs, I'd argue that 'time spent on site' is a better measure than the easily gamed (or at least cynically exploited) page view model.

His point was echoed by Mindy McAdams at Teaching Online Journalism:

Say I go to site “A” and view eight pages, but I never stay on one page longer than 2 seconds (because I don’t see anything that interests me). I go to site “B” and view only two pages, but I spend 8 minutes on each page.

Current page view metrics say that site “A” is better, more trafficked.

I say that’s just stupid, because on site “A,” I consumed no content or advertising.

Other reactions are similar.

While I agree the pageview is a particularly benign creature that is consistently overvalued, I'm not sure if "time spent" is going to work, either. I tend to leave numerous browsers open constantly, so I'm not sure if that's skewing undue "time" for all these various sites. Maybe there's a way to determine this and I'm showing my ignorance, but my larger point is that any metric we work with will have strengths and weaknesses.

And, while the view will, eventually, become obsolete, let's not forget that advertisers love 'em ... so until THEY are convinced, expect to still be taking pageviews way too seriously for a while longer.

Mindy had one other point I'd like to underscore and emphasize:

For me, that’s been the horrible thing about the page view metric — padding the numbers by adding unnecessary and highly annoying extra clicks to Web sites. Newspaper Web sites have been some of the worst offenders in this respect. (Emphasis added.)

Agreed. So let's not do that.