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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.

This is what I think:

• Community:
  • Trust the members’ input.
  • Allow the members to be known and get credit by measuring their contributions.
  • Allow other members in the community to measure and respond to contributions.
  • Enable members’ knowledge base to evolve as processes and concepts change.
  • Enables user to embrace the content ownership
• Content
  • Make it easy to contribute to your knowledge base and make it accessible to others.
  • Reviews, Ratings, Comments, Focus: Freedom of expression
  • Free content
  • Using the power of the crowd
  • Originality
  • Community decides what they want to see on the site
• Context
  • Displaying the information based on reality of the user or page
  • Giving the value to people near you (in taste or physical location)
  • Provides personalization of the content
• - Commerce
  • Adapting non-revenue-generating website into that generates revenue
  • Via affiliates programs
  • Without disturbing the community
  • Should be well hidden between the lines
  • $$$
• Personalization
  • Allowing the user to tailor the site in accordance with their tastes and preferences.
  • Caters the sense of ownership / ease of use
• Vertical Search
  • Introducing the context into search (showing results that are more relevant to user)
  • Introducing other sites (possibly affiliate sites/competitors) into search.

1. Focus on social instead of personal.
2. They solve too many problems, or try to.
3. They’re about making someone other than the user happy.
4. They sell it the wrong way.
5. Not in it for the long haul.
6. They show too much of what’s going on, and get gamed.
7. They don’t have an underlying business strategy of improving people’s lives.

nicely pointed out by Joshua Porter

1. Focus on social instead of personal.
Following up on my Del.icio.us Lesson post, this is a critical reason why web apps fail. Many apps focus on being the new social killer-app when, in general, people don’t have time to worry about what other people are doing, and will only use software that benefits them personally at every step. You could call this selfishness or laziness, but I would call it optimization. For example, we simply don’t have time to tag things for tagging sake. Instead, we might tag things if we think that it will help us in the future, but adding tags to an app does not a solution make.

2. They solve too many problems, or try to.
This is when the buzzwords rear their ugly head. If you’ve got a list of problems you’re solving with an application, it stands to reason that you can’t solve any one of them fully. Instead of trying to solve more than one, focus like gangbusters on one problem and really nail it. If you think about the successful web apps out there right now that have garnered impressive mindshare, it should be easy to line up the one problem (or activity) they really get right. Flickr: photos. Del.icio.us: bookmarks. Facebook: college. Myspace: identity. Gmail: email. Plaxo: contacts. Tailrank: news. Etc…

3. They’re about making someone other than the user happy.
So much focus is on aggregation right now that it is easy to overlook the happiness of users. Many services, such as Technorati Tags or Google Sitemaps, exist solely to make the aggregators happy, and not the user themselves. They sell themselves on incentives that sound like what a movie agent might say to an aspiring actor: – We’ll make you famous, kid. You’ll get found!”. First of all, this is all talk directed at the developer, who is not the user. That’s a huge tip-off right there. Second of all, if the aggregators had their way everyone would be using these formats, which simply dilutes the value for everyone else and only serves to lock the site into some weird relationship with the aggregator. This is not how it should be. That’s why I stopped using those two services ages ago. Instead, focus on adding features that make the user happy, and when that happens everyone else can be happy, too.

4. They sell it the wrong way.
Web apps are not about Ajax, tags, Web 2.0, SOA, REST, or any other technology. Why do so many startups and web pundits focus on these terms when talking about a product? To get a better frame of reference, talk about how your app empowers users to improve their life. Think about how the long-term successful companies sell their stuff. They relate it to some bigger idea. So, for example, Nike has always embraced the hero archetype. They might talk about how great their foam arch is, but that’s always secondary to how buying their shoes makes you a hero. Their commercials are often amateur runners out running in the rain. How cool is that? Way cooler than double-density shock foam. A good example of this in web apps is the messaging from 37signals. They’re not selling software, they’re selling rebellion.

5. Not in it for the long haul.
If you build it, they will not come. There is too much competition right now, so another wiki-type application isn’t going to set the world on fire. I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard about web apps that became successful only after they adapted to their user base over time (short periods of time, but over time nonetheless). Their initial effort didn’t work, or was too similar to another one, but they were in it for the long haul and they adapted to what their users wanted. Flickr is a great example of this. Flickr started out as a game called Game Neverending. That didn’t work, but their second attempt did. Many web app makers would never make it to the point of seeing the light (or admitting the failure).

6. They show too much of what’s going on, and get gamed.
One of the big promises of aggregating the wisdom of crowds is building systems that use the input from huge user populations to come up with value. However, as people get used to how the wisdom is aggregated, they figure out how it all works, and the more public the mechanism for aggregation, the easier it is to figure out. That’s why gaming is such an issue with Digg. The voting on Digg is public, so you can see which items have the most votes before you submit your vote yourself. This goes against one of the principles of the Wisdom of Crowds, which states that in order to successfully harness it, each member of the crowd needs to be making an independent vote.

7. They don’t have an underlying business strategy of improving people’s lives.
Most business strategy is about making money. However, this is a short term goal. If you focus only on ways to make money, then you’ll make decisions that in the short term seem good for the balance sheet but in the long term actually work against it. Take the case of LLBean. Where everyone else is trying to get away from call centers and move all of their customer interaction to a web site, LLBean actually allows you to talk to a human being almost instantaneously. Their phone number is easily found on their web site/app. This probably does cost them a lot more than if they had some contact forms or an instant chat room, but it sure does make it quick and easy to give them money. My sister worked at LLBean for a time, and I was always impressed by the way that they empowered her to handle customers. It probably cost them money in the short term, but people remember when you make their lives easier, not harder. Many companies, unfortunately, see the Web as a way to reduce direct communication with customers, when in reality it should cause an increase in communication if you’re successful.

Thoughts Aside:
With the advancement in the internet and wireless technology most of the companies are now moving their whole setup over the internet. They are introducing wireless network at their work place to ensure fast and reliable services. By installing wireless camera they can take the review of the whole work place as well. Another technology which is readily becoming popular is the internet phone system which is cheap and reliable at the same time. The installation of internet voip protocol is required to properly run this system.

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