Interesting post from Jeff Jarvis, saying that the pageview is dead.

Curious. I’ve always measured any website success on visits - so if you’ve two hundred people reading your website every weekday, then that’s 4,000 visits in a typical month, give or take. A high monthly pageview figure only tells me that a website has a lot of pages: not that it performs well as a website.

The reality, of course, is that a typical website earns its money from pageviews. That’s how we charge for websites, after all. (As I’ve written here before, cost-per-click ads aren’t always the right way to charge advertisers, since they don’t reflect the actual benefits an advertiser gets when advertising on your website). So, if we charge for a pageview - and advertisers are, by and large, buying on a CPT basis - it’s irreversibly linked to how much money a website can make.

Additionally, services like Google AdSense actively rotate ads round, to entice users into clicking them. Again, more pageviews will result in higher revenues; AJAXy goodness won’t.

So, perhaps it’s easier to agree with Jeff in that a website’s popularity shouldn’t be based on pageviews; but if it’s advertiser-funded, a website’s revenue should be still based on pageviews.

As an aside; a website I work with had a redesign recently: but some of the nicer AJAX-type functionality was removed at an early planning stage, so that we could gain extra pageviews, and thus, extra revenue. There, I suspect, is the thing to think about.