Have Page Views Changed In Their Significance?

Page Views Don't Matter Anymore Page Views Don’t Matter Anymore — But They Just Won’t Die

Julia Greenberg | December 31, 2015

The Page View is a zombie. For years, everyone has been saying it is no longer a meaningful way to measure online popularity. But the publishers who make websites and the advertisers who pay for them swore throughout the year that they’re no longer fooled. The era where a mere click is the crown jewel of metrics is dead. But someone still needs to shoot this zombie in the head.
“We’ve talked about page views dying for ten years,” says Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, a digital publishing trade group that represents publishers on the web, including WIRED parent company Condé Nast. “They’re not dead, but they should be.”

Sites can even buy bots to “click” and artificially inflate their page-view count. This kind of fraud has become a serious concern for marketers and the advertising industry, who have begun to prefer assurances that ads are actually being seen by real human beings be it on mobile or the web.

As a result, the advertising industry is looking for more meaningful metrics. Concepts like “viewability” and “transparency” are gaining currency, though what they mean and how they’re measured are still up for grabs.

“Having one specific KPI (key performance indicator) like page views or time spent doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Brian Madden, vice president of audience at Hearst Digital Media, said in a panel discussion this year. “It ignores the content entirely.”

Source: http://www.wired.com/2015/12/everyone-knows-page-views-dont-matter-but-they-just-wont-die/

<more at http://www.wired.com/2015/12/everyone-knows-page-views-dont-matter-but-they-just-wont-die/#slide-x; related links: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3028193/evidence/upworthys-headlines-are-insufferable-heres-why-you-click-anyway (Upworthy's Headlines Are Insufferable. Here's Why You Click Anyway "Curiosity-Gap Headlines" Hook Us In. Here's What Psychologists Say About Our Need to Fill in the Blanks. April 23, 2014) and http://www.opentracker.net/article/hits-or-pageviews (OpenTracker. Hits or pageviews?)>