12 Nov 07 Why visitors is a misleading metric
When we build a website, it seems quite obvious that there is one thing that you want in order to be able to monetize, it is traffic. More visitors means more opportunity to monetize. So then, it should stand to reason that if you are measuring rapidly growing visitors then you are winning the war…right?
Well, not entirely. The real objective of most websites (if not all websites) is to deliver information. Granted, for some, the payload is in the ad information, some is in the information that will lead to a transaction - but at the core, that is all a website wants to do, and really all a website can do.
So, if delivering information efficiently is the absolute goal, why are we so focused on visitors? Isn’t this just a proxy measurement?
It is because, for many companies it is the most relevant metric for their web strategy, since their “web-footprint” is small, or limited to just their email and website. It is also because to those who don’t quite understand the game, a high monthly UV means a popular site, which equates to a high value.
That thinking isn’t flawed, however, in a perfect world YouTube’s content could reach me at exactly the moment I wanted it, in whatever virtual location I was in. So long as they could deliver their advertising payload with it, this becomes the most efficient form of information delivery, and I would never visit their site. So, in a perfect world their visitors would be zero, yet they would be able to reach an audience far larger than before (and track the server calls).
This is why widgets have the buzz that they do, it is the thinking paradigm shift that information wants to be free and is virtual, so shouldn’t be chained to a domain (albeit in a virtual environment) .
This change in thinking, is taken to a radical nth degree in this discussion on “information centric network architecture”. It sounds like a much more efficient way of organising the web.
