I wouldn’t want to be the person who finds himself on the other side of a conversation with Tacoda’s Dave Morgan. The man’s been around long enough and done plenty to know what he is talking about.
But today, I read his article about the end of pageviews. Apparently, pageviews are doomed.
Bold Predictions: History Repeats Itself
Haven’t we been in this position before, when new and not-so-new mediums pop up on the mainstream media’s radar calling for the end of everything? Where’s Jeff Dachis?
For example, blogs won’t put newspapers out of business, it simply becomes a tool that newspapers can use.
Of course, I’ll be the first one to say that pageviews are meaningless in many ways, it is one of many metrics that publishers can use to derive estimates for revenues. But, the same way that a search company might be more interested with clicks (and even more specifically, paid clicks) than searches, a publisher needs to indeed account for pageview growth, rate of monetization etc. but look out for growth of unique users.
Savvy publishers know that pageviews is not important, neither is ad impressions. Sometimes it is better to let inventory go unsold than sell it to a bad advertiser. After all, a publisher has to position itself in a certain way… and therein lies the reason why pageviews are not doomed.
It’s what a publisher does with pageview, impressions, etc., that counts most. More importantly, the pageview is not doomed because it is what gives context to an ad. The MySpace’s of this world have a hard time selling pageviews, ad impressions etc., because the context of their pageviews scares advertisers.
Context is King
Contextually, this is akin to a magazine’s ad placements: ads are sold not just based on where in the magazine the ad is placed, but also next to what will the ad go.
Mr. Morgan argues that with the advent of RSS (Real Simple Syndication) and video, the pageview is doomed. Not so, the key is finding out how RSS and video - and everything else - can coexist with video.
More importantly, it is hard to place an ad next to a video, in RSS, etc. We can, but users are not comfortable and void of context, so are advertisers. This is the same thing as billboard advertising, no one wants to advertise next to a crackhouse… well, that might not be true.
I’d like to tell you my two cents on what a (not the, since different things will work for different publishers) potential balance between video and pageviews is, but at least in the video side of things, if I divulge too much, I would be giving away some of the secret that has made our video publishing site WatchMojo.com one of the largest video producers in just six months.
The only thing that is, was and will remain fairly meaningless is “hits.” I hate hearing the word. But as the Web develops, “visitor” lives alongside “unique user”; “impression” coexists with “pageview” etc. Successful publishers are those who find the sweet spot in balancing pageviews with the right amount of impressions to offer advertisers a good ROI in terms of clicks etc.
In the same vein, pageviews - be it generating them, or using them to guage revenues etc. - will remain relevant. The only thing being that other tools and metrics will gain in importance…
Pageviews not only provide context to users and advertisers, but they are the eyes of the most important traffic drivers out there: search engines. To suggest that pageviews are doomed in the context of search engines is, with all of the respect in the world to Mr. Morgan, so koolaid drinking, sign of the times, Web 2.0 nonsense that I do wonder if we are back in 1999.
Did you forget search?
Search engines index and crawl the web’s content largely due to all of the bells and whistles that are on a page view. So, page views not only give context to users, advertisers, but also to search engines. And since the hyperlinking nature of the Web is what makes the web, the web; pageviews will always be important.
What we are actually doing now is seeing two forces at play: dynamic content through RSS, Ajax etc. and dynamic content on fixed pages. Both have pros and cons. But to suggest that one would destroy the other is not really right, for some forms of content, one makes more sense, for others, the other makes more sense.
But until search algorithms fully get video content, pageviews are what matter most.
What is the value of video?
Now, when it comes to using video and knowing how to compare video, one needs to exercise common sense.
What is the value of 1 video “unit” vis a vis 1 pageview?
Well, think about it:
- CPM rates for video are 10-20 times higher than they are for traditional, online advertising.
- Broadband users soared by 33%, with anywhere from 55-75% of homes now accessing the Web with broadband connections; this is key, for until homes are connected with high-speed, video will not flourish. After all, offices might have fat pipes already, but it might be all right to be reading articles from work, I am not sure if every office allows people to be watching videos, in their full audio and video glory.
All of this to say that it is fairly easily to reconcile what a video unit is worth vis a vis a pageview with text content.
But this does not mean that this small source of confusion means the end of any medium, media or measure.
Click here to read Mr. Morgan’s piece.
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