I’ve read two recent-ish posts on this topic. One was via the IAB from The Washington Post about AOL’s apparent jump to the top of the website pile because page views were no longer the dominant metric being used to track results.
Nielsen Scraps Web Page View Rankings
Back in February, USA Today penned this article on the page view as a dying stat…
New “Visits” Metric
(via Searchviews) comScore begins touting a new metric, "visits," that allows a second visit and a third to be counted from a single user if that visit is more than 30 minutes after the previous one.
Yahoo Approves Of Visits As Metric
Measuring page views doesn’t feed the bulldog these days, thanks to dynamic technologies that update web pages without forcing a full page reload.
Yahoo, Page Views, And The Next Metric
Ajax technology that refreshes content within a web page without reloading the entire page likely contributed to a drop in page views experienced at Yahoo; it also indicates the need for a new metric to replace page views as a measurement in ad performance.
New Audience Metric Needed
I was just reading Jeneane Sessum’s post about the latest Ze Frank/Rocketboom dustup and she’s right, we need to measure stuff other than just whether a download got completed or not.
Ajax Endangers Pageviews As A Metric
Hits eventually yielded to pageviews when it came to counting web traffic, but the growing usage of Ajax technologies that refresh content without triggering a new pageview could bury that metric.