January 4th, 2007

Time To Tear Down The Wall Between Page Views And Feed Views

by Scott Karp

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With the launch of its new (and very well executed) site statitistics offering, Feedburner is perfectly positioned to push forward a desperately needed evolution in web metrics — abolish the distinction between page views and feed views. From an analytic persepctive, of course I want to know how many people read my content on the site vs. in a feed reader, but from a big picture perspective, I want to know how many people read my posts, regardless of where they read it.

How about a new metric called “content views,” which is agnostic to where or how content is viewed. Content views would integrate feed and site reading. It would do away with the silly game of giving extra “view” credit for forcing users to click through to get to more of the content. It could be adapted for audio and video, which has a time dimension.

Regardless, there’s a big, fat opportunity here just waiting to be seized.

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  • Hi Scott, we are definitely thinking about things this way, a content-centric view of statistics instead of an endpoint-centric (or whatever you want to call site v feed v widget) view of statistics. It's a very interesting opportunity, and of course it presents a bunch of challenges as well. We'll see how quickly we can get there.
  • The idea of 'content views' is one that's been around the offline publishing world for a long time... it's called 'reach'. They may print only 50,000 magazines and have only 32,000 subscribers but somehow (through doctors offices, work environments, bus stops, etc.) the 'reach' can be 100,000+ - it affects everything from prestige to the amount they can charge for advertising.
    -
    If 'content views' is the priority, 'reach' should be the extra bonus... the icing on the cake. The only way I can think to do this is through summations (or mentions) on others blogs. For instance, in the post "Blogs Have A Small Problem with Small CPM's" I may not have gone over to read Chris Anderson's original article - but I received the summary of his thoughts from that post. That's 'reach' and it should be considered in some metric. Whether taking audience totals from each site which mentioned it through trackbacks or... hum... it just needs to be somewhat measurable as to be respectable - no wild claims.
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