Is AJAX the Culprit Behind Reduced Page Views For Yahoo?

Filed in archive AJAX on December 14, 2006

The month of November saw page views for Yahoo drop and as a result MySpace led the race with 38.7 million page views in that particular month. The drop is being attributed to AJAX driven page model which Yahoo adopted and this caused the complete page refreshes per user to drop significantly.

We all know that the definition of page views with regards to a number of web analytics software is entire page getting refreshed but now a number of websites are using AJAX due to which only certain portions of the page gets refreshed which in turn results in reduced bandwidth and improved layout.

This has raised a question as to what type of page view can be regarded as an impression for advertisers and we all know that for them page views is an important criteria. Experts have been raising their opinion that AJAX affects the analytics software. It was being predicted early on that Yahoo would suffer a reduction in page views though not necessarily the traffic and it has happened.

I think the time has come when we should move beyond page views and impressions and take other factors into consideration too because you cannot stop the wind of development in the world of technology.