Mental notes to myself » AJAX

CPM and Ajax (a.k.a New Metrics)

Harun Yayli — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 03:39:13 +0000

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.

Find Articles

Harun Yayli — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 01:04:18 +0000

Hello,
I’d like to announce my new website that I’m building right now. FindInArticles.com.
This site is about articles, it crawls all known article directories, article publishing sites and gethers articles from them.
It has a really extensive categorical index. currently I have about 1000 articles but the number is growing daily.
I used Php / Mysql / Apache to build up the site. I’m planning to add some ajax toys by the time.
You can also submit articles too.

Visit me and tell me what you think thanks…

PSP Browser

Harun Yayli — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 15:32:48 +0000

The update 2.0 for PSP is out so the internet browser…

here is the headers for PSP browser…
no gzip or other encoding it seems…

A huge warning : If you want to be PSP friendly website. Don’t use upper case letters in the URL.

Update: One of the biggest questions: No it doesn’t support AJAX
and CSS is a bit problematic for the div having absolute positioning in relative divs…

Timestamp:Fri, 26 Aug 2005 15:24:45 +0000 SERVER:Array ( [DOCUMENT_ROOT] => /*******/test [HTTP_ACCEPT] => */*;q=0.01 [HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING] => [HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE] => en [HTTP_CONNECTION] => Keep-Alive [HTTP_HOST] => test.tumbleside.com [HTTP_USER_AGENT] => Mozilla/4.0 (PSP (PlayStation Portable); 2.00) [PATH] => /*******/sbin [REMOTE_ADDR] => ******* [REMOTE_PORT] => 53356 [SCRIPT_FILENAME] => /*******/browsers/infomailer.php [SERVER_ADDR] => ******* [SERVER_ADMIN] => ******* [SERVER_NAME] => test.tumbleside.com [SERVER_PORT] => 80 [SERVER_SIGNATURE] =>

Apache/1.3.33 Server at test.tumbleside.com Port 80


    [SERVER_SOFTWARE] => Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 PHP/4.4.0 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7a

    [GATEWAY_INTERFACE] => CGI/1.1

    [SERVER_PROTOCOL] => HTTP/1.1

    [REQUEST_METHOD] => GET

    [QUERY_STRING] =>

    [REQUEST_URI] => /browsers/infomailer.php

    [SCRIPT_NAME] => /browsers/infomailer.php

    [PATH_TRANSLATED] => /*******/infomailer.php

    [PHP_SELF] => /browsers/infomailer.php

    [argv] => Array

        (

        )

[argc] => 0 )

Google Maps Pedometer

Harun Yayli — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 17:56:02 +0000

A great application using Google Map APIs

http://sueandpaul.com/gmapPedometer/

Google Maps API

Harun Yayli — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 20:24:42 +0000

Google Maps API is released

from Google Blog : http://www.google.com/apis/maps/ and

Microsoft for AJAX?

Harun Yayli — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 16:43:59 +0000

Not to be left out of any development trends, Microsoft is working to simplify the job of building so-called AJAX applications, or Web applications with sophisticated graphics.

The company is building software, code-named Atlas, that provides developers with tools designed to ease creation of AJAX-style applications. An early version of the software will be made available to developers at the company’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles in September.

from News.com