Rubel

Speaking at a conference of AJAX devotees, Steve Rubel once again declared how the web-authoring technology will impact web metrics, reports InternetNews.
Rubel's comments come from a presentation at AJAXWorld, a gathering of web professionals focused on the technology. AJAX, because it allows for content to be displayed in a different way than HTML, doesn't allow the tallying of pageviews because there are no longer multiple pages to view. That is making life difficult for publishers and advertisers, since pageviews have long been a measure of how popular a website is, which subsequently determines ad rates and placement.

Although he doesn't yet know what sort of metric will replace pageviews in the publishing/ad-buying conversation, Rubel predicts it only has about three years left before being completely eliminated. Part of what he predicts the future will hold is the spreading of content through widgets, or bits of code that publishers put on their site to pull in content from other sources.

He also says while ad-supported models will always have a place, as metrics change there could be a move by some high-value providers to adopt a subscription-fee model.