Yahoo: Lower Page Views Due to AJAX
Yesterday's comScore Media Metrix report, exclaiming that estimates of page views for social networking site MySpace at 38.7 million for the month of November topped those for Yahoo by 600,000, came with some small print that should have generated …
Context & Ripple Effects
comScore Media Metrix's November estimates put [[a:|MySpace]] at 38.7 million page views, roughly 600,000 above Yahoo — and Yahoo's response is the interesting part: it attributes the shortfall not to lost audience but to its adoption of AJAX, which serves content without full page reloads and therefore mechanically deflates the count. In other words, the number one and number two properties in the ranking are now being scored against each other on a metric one of them has deliberately engineered away.
The timing matters for both sides. MySpace takes the crown weeks after a self-propagating QuickTime worm exploited a profile vulnerability across its pages, so its traffic win lands amid security questions. For Yahoo, the miss feeds an ongoing investor argument — one analyst insists Yahoo must grow earnings faster than Google through cost cuts, audience growth, acquisitions or better monetization to regain interest, while a CNBC analyst makes the bullish counter-case that Yahoo outperforms Google in 2007.
First-order effects
- Yahoo now ranks behind MySpace in comScore's page-view tally despite a far broader audience, and its AJAX-heavy interface guarantees the gap persists as long as rankings are computed from raw page loads.
- MySpace gains a headline traffic claim it can carry into ad-sales negotiations, even though the underlying user base comparison favors Yahoo.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers and analysts who price display inventory off page views face a distorted comparison between AJAX-built portals and traditional paginated sites, pressuring measurement firms like comScore to supplement counts with time-on-site and interaction data.
- Rival portals weighing their own AJAX rebuilds get a new cost line item: richer interfaces now come at the price of visible rank in the industry's most-cited traffic league table.
Third-order effects
- If rich-internet-application adoption spreads, the page view itself loses standing as the currency of web scale — measurement vendors and ad buyers will be pushed toward engagement-based currencies, reshaping how portal competition is scored.
- The episode foreshadows a structural split in which platforms optimize for product experience while accepting worse optics on legacy metrics, leaving third-party measurers as arbiters of which numbers investors actually trade on.
The trend: As portals rebuild around AJAX and single-page interactions, web traffic measurement is being forced from raw page views toward engagement-based metrics, with comScore-style tallies losing authority as the industry scoreboard.