Evan williams has a great post on why Pageviews are Obsolete
In summary he shows that Page Views are often lower for better designed sites, and this therefore lowers Alexa rank.
Last week I posted that Alexa was only 5% accurate for sites outside the top 1000, as a relative measure, based on the sampling error being so high outside of this range. The Page View problem further reduces this accuracy.
In short, if you want to appear low in Alexa, appeal to an audience of non-techies and have a well designed site. (Etsy’s real traffic data is porbably spectacular, by this measure).
This problem, however, is not just an esoteric one. Page views are being replaced by Ajax ‘page flakes’ but there is no advertising system for Ajax.
To do this for Google Adsense, would require creating a complete ad preloading and caching system which would violate Google T&C’s.
Blogging showed that ITEMS were more important than PAGES, from a semantic perspective. The rise of Video and audio is also changing this view for obvious reasons. This now extends to an application perspective.
Here’s a lazyweb idea – an ‘item view’ stats package, with an ad serving system directly geared around Ajax driven sites.
In a sense this could seem hopelessly naiive – to try and re-educate advertisers around a new paradigm. But its not advertisers that need re-educated its techies. Advertisers measure IMPRESSIONS – and most page refreshes on sites like Myspace are not impressions, if the content remains the same, when you request some functionality, like an ’email this’ form.