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Thursday, July 21, 2005
 
MarketingVOX: An Odd Take on Ajax
MarketingVOX is running a little article entitled "Ajax May Undermine Web Advertising, Analytics Models." Read it, it's...odd.

The focus is a claim that Ajax (referred to in the article as "hodgepodge of JavaScript, Dynamic HTML, and XML") may cause the impressions-based Web advertising sky to fall, by screwing with the metrics used: "Traffic metrics are also affected by the technology, because most sites measure traffic in terms of visitors and pageviews. Though visitor counts are unaffected, [Adaptive Path's Lane] Becker says 'this blows away the page-view metaphor. Click paths have to be measured differently.'"

Weird. Point A, if use of Ajax makes for better user experience, "oh, but if we use it we'll have to re-think how we make money" doesn't seem like an argument with a lot of legs. Point B, it sure seems like the complaint isn't that the tracking of page views will be incorrect in any way, but rather that use of Ajax means that where a site's visitors once had to suffer through three or four page reloads to accomplish a single task they will now have a single page load -- which reduces artificially high pageview "inventory" numbers.

Technology happens, and businesses have to adapt to that technology -- whether the implications are exciting and heavy with low-hanging hundred dollar bills or lose-your-shirt scary.*


* Okay, unless you're the MPAA or RIAA. Then you just pretend that the technology has absolutely no implications whatsoever for your business model, and ask congress to make that fantasy the law of the land.
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