Speakeasy: The Slow Death of the Page View

The shortcomings, flaws and growing irrelevance of the page view are undeniable, but will the page view die as quickly as so many predict or hope? To the detriment of the online publishing industry's advancement, my prediction is the metric will fade, or evolve, pretty slowly. I agree with Dan Melvin, who commented on Fred Wilson's blog post on the topic: "[O]nline media metrics are only the tail, and they don't wag the dog anymore. The dog is advertising revenue, and that will drive what metrics are used. But the reality is that decision-making on where to buy online ad space doesn't change very quickly, so I'm not convinced that metrics will change quickly either, even though they should in a perfect world. PVs and UVs will likely still be used just because they provide comparability. Even if they become less accurate proxies to what ad buyers really want to know, they might persist just because there are no better universally used proxies. Hopefully better metrics will become universally used but I think it will take a long time."

- Page Views Weaken As Metric - But Won't Die in 2007 by Max Kalehoff, MediaPost (Free Reg Req.), 01.05.07