I won’t miss the Pageview as a web analytics measurement - it’s pretty inaccurate measure of traffic nowdays, especially in light the increasing amount of RSS Traffic, as MediaPost pointed out last month (you may need an account to read the article).

"….Essentially, consumers are creating their own "page views" on their own time and own terms, and largely out of control of the publishers that provide the content. Thus, for consumers using RSS, the notion of page view is now all about what they have chosen to "pull," generally from many different publishers at once. It is no longer about what one particular publisher "pushed."

"….As consumers more and more define a portion of their media consumption by what they subscribe to, not just what they browse to, the notion of a publisher-defined page view will become less and less relevant. "

I have been doing a lot of Rich Media tracking lately - I won’t say for who - actually, for many of my clients - as more of them are getting into Online Video and many already do have podcasts.

"…Of course, RSS won’t be the only culprit when the page view goes away. The increasing importance of online video is having the same effect. How do you compare a 10-minute video engagement to the consumption of ten one-minute pages? If you were counting by page views, how would you count the video? Is it one "page" view? Does it represent just one-tenth the measurement value of the 10 browser pages?

The answer lies with the client - with some guidence from me - it’s what the client chooses to want to peg engagement to - what measurement, from those available to pull data for.

And then, you have to figure in newer ad serving technologies like PointRoll and hybrid pages using Ajax Programming - measurement becomes more complex-

"How about the introduction of other new Web 2.0 technologies like AJAX, where publishers can create virtual client-server architectures and "stream" or update dynamic content from multiple sources onto users’ pages, without the users calling for new pages? This really explodes the historical notion of the page view as a way to measure how many pages or how much content was consumed. "

I was just talking to some one at a large advertising company last week on how many ads were driving traffic to a specific campaign using PointRoll forms (those annoying ads for Car Insurance where you can fill out the form in the ad) - the data could not be collected out of the Web Analytics platform because it’s no in the Analytics - it’s in a backend application that reads the PointRoll data.

According to the MediaPost article - the PageView has about 2 years of life left.

"How fast will this happen? Given the pace of the adoption of these new technologies, as well as the rapid ramp-up of broadband, which acts as an accelerator, I think that the page view as we know it will become meaningless in two years."

Meaningless in 2 years?  I think it’s just about meaningless now.

"…..with the notion of unique audience becoming more important. Engagement–how deeply consumers interact with particular content and with particular ads–will become much more important. The actual results of the ads, whether it be generating leads or sales or requests for information, will become more important. "

Everyone wants to measure engagement - but there are no standards yet for such a measurement - it depends on how the client defines engagement at this point - we try to peg the Web Analytics to measure what the customer thinks is engagement because everyone defines it differently.   

If fact, I was interviewed about this at the ClickZ Online Video Summit last June and you can listen to the Podcast here (you may need to use ITunes to listen to the Podcast).