It’s kinda weird that I just posted on Death of PageViews as a web analytics measurement, earlier today , (maybe I ought to do a painting about it) when Xeni Jardin over at Boing Boing almost wrote the same post, but used different source data! 

"Evan Williams (Odeo CEO and Pyra/Blogger co-founder) has an interesting post up about the fading significance of pageview and hit counts in determining the reach and influence of websites. Ajax, RSS and widgets have something to do with it, argues Ev — but so does crappy design that effectively forces the user to clickclickclick many times to accomplish a task that leaner design would permit in just a single click. Crappy design like you’ll find on MySpace. Snip: "

That’s a interesting point (one that I did not make because it was not in the MediaPost article I quoted from earlier).  If your site has crappy design (and Evan Williams is kinda saying MySpace has crappy coding) which causes their pageviews to be inflated because you need to click a lot more to get something done that if it were done, say, in Ajax - than your site sucks and you can’t trust the PageViews as a measurement of interest or site usage.  

What’s weird is that Wall Street is rewarding the crappy design because some might have looked at MySpace’s PageViews a measure of visitor demand (and eyeballs, to some extent) which it’s not. It’s always strange to reward lousy coding with more money - but I hear it happens(happened) a lot, esp in the late 90’s.

"Pageview counts are as susceptible as hit counts to site design decisions that have nothing to do with actual usage. As Mike Davidson brilliantly analyzed in April, part of the reason MySpace drives such an amazing number of pageviews is because their site design is so terrible. As Mike writes: "Here’s a sobering thought: If the operators of MySpace cleaned up the site and followed modern interface and web application principles tomorrow, here’s what the graph would look like:

Read Ev’s entire post here. "

Hmm, that Alexa chart would be very disturbing if I were the owner of MySpace and my, new, redesigned site generated only 25% of the pageviews it did before.  I guess quality over quanity.  Except it’s not quality that your getting on MySpace, according to Sean Bonner when he posted about MySpace can eat a bag of dick.

"Yesterday I was reading about how the completely shit-ass design of MySpace is what gives them so much traffic (people need to click through 97 pages to do something they could do in one click on another site) and today I’ve added another reason to puke at the thought of that site. I keep getting e-mails from them that some skank named Jennifer has invited me to join her group "Hot Videos" but since I can’t do anything with the e-mail I have to go to the site to take action on it. Except even though I was on the site hours ago it’s forgotten my cookie and I have to login again. Except it says "you need to login to do that!" I need to login to login? OK, now, 3 pages later I’m logged in. And then I have to go home. And then I have to go to the mailbox. And then I have to go to the message. 6 pages later I finally get to this message and hit deny, to which I’m treated to a "sorry, you can’t do this because we suck and are having errors or the Atari 2600 box this whole site is running on just got unplugged or something" bullshit error message. Basically it won’t let me deny the message. I try again and again. I’ve now given MySpace about 20 page views trying to delete this spam. Finally I decide to just report it as spam instead, except I can’t do that either because of the same error that says they can’t deny the request. Worst. Site. Ever.

I think I know who Jennifer is …. the woman with 1 million "friends" on MySpace.  Actually, I had it confused with Christine Dolce - nicknamed "Forbidden" - She’s the lady with one million friends.  Same thing.