A Better Impression
The UK’s best-known website auditing firm, ABCe, will move to measuring unique users instead of page impressions as its mandatory measurement metric. Page impressions have come under fire as a metric for several reasons, not least the ability to fake results by splitting a story over several pages.
This is good news for professional blogs: Because blogs tend to have their most recent stories all on one page, page impressions per user tend to be low. You have a look at the new stuff and move on. A measurement that is based on the number of readers they have will better reflect their popularity. This should allow popular blogs to compete more easily for mainstream advertising, which has often been sold on a cost-per-thousand impressions basis in the past.
It’s good news for Web 2.0 sites too: A lot of Web 2.0 sites use dynamic pages, as you know. Instead of reloading the page, new information comes streaming in via an XMLHttpRequest instruction. Think about something like Writely, now called Google Docs. You might use it for three hours and never reload the page. If that was your business, and you sold advertising to support it, then you wouldn’t be too happy about being judged on page impressions.