Friday, 15 May 2009
10 Million Page Views A Month But Who Cares?
In this modern world there are a few things our society finds sacred. Youth, wealth, fame. These are the three most important of these sacred and sought after trait but when it comes to the world of the internet, there is another sacred quality. Website traffic.
Time and time again we see the number of page views, visitors, hits, registered members or some other unit for measuring sheer quantity being used to quantify and qualify the success or failure of online business ventures.
The problem with this addiction to quantity is that it’s a pretty useless measurement. Yes your online business or blog or Twitter account better have some traffic reaching it for it to be viable, but the elevation of this notion of quantity to the status of an all-eclipsing indication of success and admiration is flawed.
Ashton Kutcher may have over a million followers on Twitter but so what? What’s he going to do with all those followers? What’s he going to achieve asides the massaging of his ego?
The problem is that paying lip service to this issue online isn’t sufficient, we have to literally change the way we talk about websites and move away from this notion of page impressions, views, hits to a more mature and useful vocabulary.
You don’t often hear websites described on the basis of their solid conversion rates, or on the high participation or usage of their registered membership. Maybe sites like twitter viewed through the lens of user-loyalty could be defined as failures (less than half the people who attempted to use it couldn’t figure it out and left), maybe the fact that Google gets such a huge proportion of monthly searches indicates a lack of imagination and innovation on the part of competitors rather than an absolutely flawless service from Google.
I’m playing devils advocate here, but it helps illustrate that the perceived success of online business depends highly on our perspective. I feel it’s high time we develop a wider view than one that only asks ‘how much traffic do you get’.
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