Facebook’s photo galleries just got better. The photo pages now have an Ajax interface, which let the images load faster. But what is good for Facebook users may not be good for Facebook, at least in the short term. As Facebook improves its user interface with more Ajax and other user-interface technologies that update images and data without reloading the entire page, it is bound to take a short-term hit in its overall number of pageviews.
Ajax makes Websites more efficient by bringing information to a page that previously required multiple clicks through a site. To most Web measurement firms like comScore and Nielsen/NetRatings, a site that shifts to Ajax looks like it is losing pageviews. And photos account for a lot of the pageviews on Facebook.
Coupled with the possible pageview inflation due to Beacon, traffic and pageview numbers from Facebook bear extra close scrutiny over the next few months. (The switch to Ajax in photos should start to be reflected in the December numbers). Pageviews may dip, but the metric to keep an eye on is time spent on the site (both overall and per-session). If that continues to grow, then Facebook will be doing fine.
Shouldn’t unique visitors (not absolute) be the important metric anyways?
Boris is correct.
Page views are so 1990s
I think Erick assumed pageviews per unique visitor.
Moreover, Erick is right that pageviews don’t matter, but the key metric is time spent for every unique visitor.
This is fascinating. What they’re doing is actually combining a significant value to a single page. these guys are in the boardroom are rethinking the monetization model, call me crazy, but it’s just like the advertising scheme on times square. $450k/month for a billboard ad that is static on a highly focused area.
Similar execution here. they can actually reinvent the ad monetization system by demanding more money for the amount of time users spend on a single page (hot property) displaying ads. brilliant!
who care about click-through. it’s dollar per exposure!
oops. didn’t mean to contradict myself at the end. I mean, high dollar value per single exposure. it wouldn’t be difficult to rank the photo galleries for internal purposes.
facebook is one of the smartest companies out there when it comes to metrics and internal measurements.
they know exactly how to spin that tiny weeny ego of yours to get you to do more stuff.
they are not going to be care that much about obselete ways of measurement.
Microsoft engineers help Facebook to speed up the process. Not bad for Mark Zuckerberg and his team.
Not really…
They could still count the hits to download the images. Yeah that doesn’t do much for ads.
One more thing, since they are using Ajax they could be pre-fetching the images for quick load. That means most pictures in an album are pre-downloaded. Hence the number of hits to the server will increase significantly
I think this was a brilliant move on their part. The amount of bandwidth they were spending on incidental pageviews like those from photo to photo, redrawing the entire page must have been a ton. There’s also no reason to put their servers through the amount of load required to process each of those pages over and over. They’ll make this up in CPU cycles and bandwidth savings alone.
Plus, I loved being able to completely *breeze* through an album just now. I think it’ll get people to stick around longer, since they perceive faster loading as a better use of their time than waiting 2-3 seconds between photo loads waiting to see the album.
Are pure pageviews the metric anyone’s looking at? Or is it unique visitors, recurring visitors, and the lengths of their visits?
Good move, Facebook, in a sea of recent stupid ones.
You know Facebook is on to something when even Li Ka Shing is in with a $60 million stake.
I’ve long expected an Ajax upgrade. It’s simply logical from a technological standpoint and a bandwidth stanpoint.
This should artificially increase their CTR, one of the most abysmal in the industry. And as Chris and others have stated, they will be able to demand more per ad view. It’s a good move. But, building on Chris’s comments, they need to learn more from their mistakes.
They’ve fumbled several times to their critics and they have not found the right balance to managing criticisms and implementing innovations. I can imagine the uproar they will experience if and when they implement a competitor to Adsense or to Google Analytics. If they don’t learn from their past mistakes and form a more coherent strategy for implementation and criticism control, they will get burned by the media and its users. That could spell trouble for its expansion plans outside of social networking. It won’t stop them, but it could really slow them down.
“Pageviews may dip, but the metric to keep an eye on is time spent on the site (both overall and per-session).”
The metric to keep your eye on is how much money they actually make, tool.
Just as facebook redefined the traditional meaning of “News Feed” (usenet),
why don’t the measurement companies/communities redefine “Page View”
to also count the ajax pageloads? an ajax page is also a page, /ac.
I can gurantee you that Facebook doesn’t care about pageviews (those went out last decade) and that bandwidth/scalability is a very secondary reason for them making this type of modification. Facebook is obviously doing this because they think it’s a better user experience. Period.
Like other big companies (see Yahoo) Facebook also finally realized that the old model of measuring page views is dead.
Although there are still too many advertisers who looks on this metric, the industry as all knows we need to go into a new way of measuring web site.
I was in Ad Tech in NY this month and the hot subject that came up all the time was how should we measure web site and campaigns effectiveness.
And no. The answer is not what comscore calls engagement and others call attention.
Like page views, measuring how much time a user spend on a page is not always the right thing. For example, today I spent a few minutes in one of the pages in Delta.com but it wasn’t because it was very interesting. It was because it was organized so bad that I couldn’t find the function I was looking for.
It’s also not the number of uniques. Advertisers are starting to learn that it’s better to get the right 100 users to click on their ad than the wrong 1000.
What we need is a new metric that really shows us how much users are engaged with the site content and brand. How much their interacting with it (aka views, comments, posting, rating, etc).
It’s the sum of all their actions that makes up this new metric.
(for full disclosure, my startup is working just on this kind of stuff. But that’s just shows that I truly believe that this is the way we need to go)
Regardless of how it affects page views, I would just like to say that Photos is now SO MUCH FASTER.
How is Nielsen measuring time on site? Typically, tools based on Javascript tags measure the difference between the timestamp put on a visit to each page to determine time on site.
For example:
Page 1 – 12:10
Page 2 – 12:12
Page 3 – 12:15
Exit
Time on site would be 5:00 (the session times out after 30 minutes and the last time stamp is not counted).
With Ajax, page views start becoming (even more) irrelevant. Thus, any metric based on them becomes irrelevant. What’s more, tabbed browsing severely curtails the importance of this metric.
If Nielsen is using some other measure, perhaps Ajax won’t present the problem of timestamps, but all of the other issues with time on site still hold true.
It’s probably better to watch:
– Member growth rate
– Member abandonment rate
– Member Satisfaction (as calculated by non-web analytics primary research such as ForeSee or OpinionLabs)
– Visits/Unique Visitor (as a crude measure of share of member)
@1 and 2: Yes, it’s nice to talk about other types of metrics, but the reality is that clients are still buying in a largely PV-dominated universe. Although other metrics are important talking points, PV is still the measurement that media buyers use. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
I’m not sure I understand what is being said in the previous comments.
Pageviews, while antiquated, are a measure of a site’s ad inventory. Just like ClearChannel’s billboards, they need to know how many display opportunities they can offer to advertisers. But, just like with Billboards, some are in high value locations (times square) and others are not (like 7 Mile and Livernois in Detroit). So Facebook’s move seems more like an admission that much of their inventory such as in its picture viewing is of low value (and costs a lot due to the server loads).
This is a significant movement only because it shows that Facebook is really struggling to attract high-value, premium advertisers to their site (think about it – have you seen a Sprint, GM, or Netflix ad on FB? they’re all top advertisers).
I suspect we’ll begin to see more of this along with more aggressive ad locations (in the newsfeed).
Given Beacon’s difficulty, this is a necessity they’ll have to adapt to.
Let’s face it. If Facebook can’t generate multiple billions in revenue, then it spells doom for the consumer internet space.
TechCrunch, I don’t know how others feel, but I’m not interested in Facebook’s every blink. These are really tiny feature changes that you write whole posts on.
The other day, I think you blogged about Facebook removing the word “is” in status messages. That’s not major on any level. That day, I removed TechCrunch from my feed reader. (I got here through a friend mocking TC)
Facebook opening up apps to third-parties: BIG. Facebook using more AJAX on one of their pages: SMALL.
You seem to try to tie this in to a paradigm shifting experiment in a new form of advertising. It’s not. It would be trivial to make the Ad change on every new AJAX load along with the pictures, making it functionally equivalent to a new page (except that it uses much less bandwidth).
So please, I beg of you, for your silent readers and for ex-readers who once enjoyed learning about innovative companies, please stop using Facebook and telling us about it.
Just for the record;
It’s not actually AJAX. There are no XHR object requests going through from your browser to the server (or the other direction).
If you look at their source, it’s pretty interesting; they write out ALL of the images in a photo album in the html, and store it inside of a JSON object.
When you click next, instead of asking the server for the next picture, with it’s comments etc., it can pull that info directly from the code that has already been loaded in the user’s browser. It’s alot faster this way, since even AJAX calls can take sometime to load.
Additionally, as you’ll notice that it doesn’t take the images any time to load, this is because when you’re browser first loads, it starts loading them all into your browsers memory.
This is all technical crap, but just thought it was worth mentioning. I hate the word AJAX.
That’s actually pretty interesting, Oliver.
“AJAX”
I understand where you’re coming from. At the last startup where I was, the CEO kept pushing the programmers to “AJAXify” the site more and more. The site ended up looking comically sad.
As a term in a domain language, I think AJAX is useful. It’s more specific than “dynamic” or “javascript.” It’s much shorter than “”they write out ALL of the images in a photo album in the html, and store it inside of a JSON object. When you click next, instead of asking the server for the next picture, with it’s comments etc., it can pull that info directly from the code that has already been loaded in the user’s browser. “”
What a difference. I love the new upgrade.
Disappointed in the article… very valid point regarding AJAXing a site will hinder its ‘page view’ impressions however no mention at all that FB realizes that page views and the ‘CPM’ model are not here to stay.
Agreed it may unfairly hurt their CPM revenues in the near term the more they AJAXify, however we all know FB is looking forward. Again they prove a solid user experience trumps near-term revenue.
Facebook 1. Erick Schonfeld 0
Ya, it’s just a technical point. AJAX refers specifically to requesting/sending data between the browser and server without a page refresh, which FB is not doing. It’s interesting simply because they’re willing to push 25 times (guess, maybe 50 pics per album, but only half the page is unique data) more data every time a person clicks on a picture.
But ya, I agree. AJAX is more or less a term that defines things happening based on user interaction, rather than the boring technical definition I just spit out.
Have to agree with #20.
I would rather read about half-bad new startup with any kind of potential to grow then about ‘look: mamoth x has brand new light bulb on front porch – 5% less energy used!’
I can compare feeling I have reading this with feeling I have reading new Mac OS X Tiger reviews on some other blogs: ‘Oh, they have mirror effect on the screen bottom now!’, ‘Quick file preview too!’. Just to be clear, worked on XP for many years, love how OS X looks, switched to Linux, but quick preview is something simply too common for any other OS making me shocked that they did not have it earlier.
I do have my own company in silent alpha mode, in next two months we will go beta and it is very important for us to get review on TC but if happens that we submit our startup to TC in the same time when facebook changes it’s dark blue header color to lighter one I can’t imagine what will happen.
So, TC guys, do you promisse to spend at least 5 minutes thinking about my startup and if to review it? Even if facebook has 0.005 seconds blackout time on all servers on the same day? Thanks
TC guys,
that ’stop writing so much about fb’ really gets on my nerves. There is so much to learn and participate even from an article of ’small intereest’.
So don’t stop writing about fb – take every bit you might think it’s interesting.
For all of you who aren’t interested in such articles – hint, hint – there is a scrollbar on the right hand of your browser.
Ah Another “Question” Headline. Nice one, Eric. It wouldn’t be Monday otherwise.
“Will Pageviews Suffer?”
“Will Batman Escape The Penguin’s Death Trap?”
“Will TechCrunch Stop Writing About Stupid Facebook Enhancements?”
Tune in next week to find out. Oh Boy!…
this is comment
Applause to a company working on improving their user’s experience; rather than worrying about pageview numbers. I agree that time spent per day/month (which basically totals the number of interactions with a site per day/month) are the true metrics.
Always improve your product/service to your true customers: your loyal users.
Hermann, signal to noise. Most of this Facebook stuff is noise. According to your “scrollbar” inanity, why doesn’t TechCrunch talk about every single step of every single startup (so that we can ostensibly “learn”)?
AJAX is old hat. That Facebook is using slightly more means nothing. Everyone knows about the effects on pageviews, and everyone knows it does not matter and can only improve user experience and overall satisfaction.
Some blogger did a poll of their readers recently (Problogger?) asking “what are the main reasons you would delete a feed from your feed reader”? The main one was “Too many articles”. I think what they meant was, “too many uninteresting articles.” Obviously, you wouldn’t complain about too many interesting articles. TechCrunch used to have many mostly interesting articles.
Is the bubble really over? Did you run out of new at least half-good startups to talk about?
Actually, it would be really interesting if you could keep a tally of how many startup pitches you receive every day. I think that would be a really interesting look at the growth of new media.
You use gmail right? Can you have someone go back and look at that? I’d love to see this data.
I thought it had already been established that page views were irrelevant — especially with Facebook.
Please write some real articles. Everyone who reads these blog entries are smart enough to think beyond such junior-ish site issues.
Will facebook be the first to make the move from pageviews to time spent? Only a big player, AND a challenger, like Facebook, can make the ad business evolve…
As a former R&D Director at NetRatings, I’ve long been convinced the time is now the scarce resource of the Internet.
To 113.com, there are too many events to count them all as pageviews. Advertisers would never accept this metrics, that depends too much on the website.
If you have the choice between bad ergonomics (and soon a dicreasing audience) and good ergonomics but lower pages views, what do you choose? Facebook will be obliged to show banners that are automatically refreshed, every, let’s say, one minute. The average time spent per page is one minute, so it won’t change anything for the advertisers’ budget.
Time spent is a relevant AND reliable metrics, if you measure it the right way, as our tools do…
I agree with the other comments that page views are not important compared to unique visitors, time spent on site etc. however, page views are still a very important metric when it comes to one of the most important monetization methods, whether we like it or not, CPM ads are widely used and will probably remain so for a long time, unless someone comes up with a new model of monetization, which isn’t that easy, we all saw how beacon backfired.
Q
I understand your objection, but on the other hand: There _is_ a discussion about all the things belonging to this article going on here. So it seems to me, not everyone is upset by ‘nonessential’ nois about fb.
And – may be you bear with a german reader who is hardly missing something like TC over here in Germany. There is a big lack of information. And perhaps a disinterest in general if I compare TC with the wannabe TC called deutsche-startups.de – 624k readers to 2906 readers. And thats the biggest one here.
This article is technically inaccurate and it’s focus is way out of date
Reed: …