Steve Rubel said something real interesting at the AJAXWorld which caught my attention. He stated that web authoring technology would be creating an impact on web metrics. He stated that with AJAX problems occurred with regards to page views since multiple pages could not be viewed which in turn affected the statistics of a site since page views is used by advertisers for finding out the popularity of the site. As a result of this advertisers and publishers are standing at crossroads

Rubel predicts that some sort of metrics would be replacing page views three years down the lane and in the future content would be spread through widgets or bits of code which publishers would be putting on their site in order to pull in content from other sources. Though ad supported models would not go anywhere but subscription fee model might start gaining ground.

I agree with Rubel since a number of sites and portals are adopting AJAX and have been facing problems with regard to the popularity of the site being associated with page views. Yahoo too suffered since it page views plummeted when it used AJAX. I think the time has come when we need to consider other criteria too while judging the popularity of the site rather than just being dependant on page views.