For the first time ever, Fox’s combined sites lead by MySpace have surpassed Yahoo in page views, according to Comscore’s November stats. While MySpace continues to grow, Yahoo experienced a drop in pageviews from October. Yet, as Yahoo points out, the portal still dominates when it comes to unique users — 129.9 million compared to 57.2 million for MySpace. And Yahoo blamed the drop in pageviews on its new designs that use AJAX technology, which load content dynamically inside a page instead of forcing a new pageview. True enough, this is one of the biggest issues facing web developers today: AJAX improves usability but decreases pageviews. In fact, the Internet Advertising Bureau has urged both major web analytics companies to consider reforming its measurement practices to either account for partial refreshes or come up with a new metric for pageviews. Meanwhile, there’s a shift in the industry away from pageviews to unique users, but it’s not going to happen overnight, especially as the old fashioned CPM remains the currency of internet advertising.
For example, mouse over the weather tab on Yahoo’s home page and the information dynamically loads in the page, pushing the other content down. Normally, users would be taken to a new page for the same information.
