I was trying not to write about facebook but it came to a point that it’s a good example for my post.

Classic web advertising for banners (in some cases text links) are still paid by impressions. Like the banners on the left column of Facebook pages, everytime user changes a page, an ad is shown, and the advertiser is charged per 1000 impressions. Everybody knows that there is nothing interesting with this.

Facebook, some weeks ago has changed their photo gallery to an ajax photo gallery.
Everytime you see a photo and start browsing to the other photos, without refreshing the page, an Ajax call was done and new photo was shown on the very same page. There was no refresh, therefore the rest of the page -as well as the banner on the left- were not changed.

Facebook recently switched back to their old way. One photo is 1 page view again. I wondered why? It was really obvious. They’ve lost major page views with just this change. On the old system, people were rapidly viewing photos spending (in most cases) no more than 15 seconds per photo. For an album of 20 photos, it was an easily generated 20 page views for them. New system, slowed down the page views but now the users were spending more time on the same page with the same banner. Still with the old metric, 1 page view for 20 photos.

Web metrics, still measured with page views in most cases. Starting with the use of RSS, this metric started to crack down. 100k subscribers to an RSS feed, and only a few thousand user on the website, seemed like a website has no traffic.

We still measure advertisements with page views. This kills the use of ajax for most actions for the sake of doing a page view. There must be a good comprimise in between.

Finetune.com, when they’ve first launced, the website was all ajax. Every page’s content was loaded with ajax and there was only 1 page view for the user. The rest was stream of data.

Songza.com, you are always in the same page but you do a lot of actions.

definr as well brings all it’s content with ajax on the very same page.
You may easily find more examples like these.

Also, you can’t really refresh the advertisment block on a page with every X amount of ajax calls done. Advertisment networks like Google’s Adsense strictly forbindens the use of this kind of stuff to generate page views. They think it’s fake page views. In fact it’s not.

All these said, web 2.0 needs a new metric to measure. I don’t know how they are going to call it but XHRs should be accounted for.
Here are my candidates for the new metric.

XPU: XHRs per User. Measures, how many ajax calls done by user per session.
XPP: XHRs per page. Measures, how many ajax calls done in a page.

These still will not invalidate the page view metric. These are just multipliers or supplementary.

So how would the advertisers pay with these metrics? How should this translate to the old world?

Lets keep the numbers small just for this example’s purpose:

Site A, a classic website with 100 users and 1000 pages has 200 page views per user per month.
Site B, a web 2.0 website with 100 users and 10 pages has 10 page views per user per month, 200 XPU and 20 XPP.

With the old metric Site A is more successfull.
With the new composite metric, Site B is more successfull.

Site A has (100 users * 200 pages) = 20K pageviews per month
Site B (100 users * 10 pages * 200 XPU) = 200K pageview per month.

Advertising on a page with higher XPP should be much more expensive then a static page because, the refresh rate of the page is low and possibly user will have more time to notice the banner on the same page.

Honestly, I would be scared to put an advertisement on Facebook. Since there are too many users and there is no open metric to measure how much time user spends on a page, your advertisement dollars would be wasted in a minute, without getting enough attention from the users.

The new ajax photo gallery of facebook was more advertiser friendly. User views 10, 20 photos on the very same page, possibly having more time to notice the advertisement when finished viewing all the photos.

Facebook switched back to their old photo gallery now. Possibly all the advertisment contracts were made with CPM and they were loosing money.

Recent Entries

• memcache.php is now part of pecl/memcache
• memcache.php goes PECL
• memcache.php stats like apc.php
• oci_bind_by_name maxlength is not so optional
• Is Sun going to buy PHP too?(PHP Quebec 2008)
• PHP APC apc_shm_create error on CLI
• Facebook’s Buggy Spam Detection
• Is it Firefox or Zend Debugger? Cookie Standards
• ezComponents ready for prod?
• You Used PHP to Write WHAT?!

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.