Yahoo Ajax-powered functions

As a metric, the pageview is going extinct, according to Micro Persuasion's Steve Rubel, because it fails to capture the myriad ways consumers engage in online activities in the Web 2.0 era. Case in point, Yahoo's pageview numbers fell last year as it turned to newer technologies, such as Ajax and Flash, though its sites remained as popular as ever.

One candidate for replacing the pageview is "events" - interactions that a person has within a page - which sophisticated web measurement tools, such as Google Analytics, can track, including Flash and Ajax interactions. However, for now at least, comScore does not track events.

Another popular metric is "unique visitors" to a site. However, the metric does not account for people's use of multiple screens/computers.

Finally, there is "time spent" - great for video-sharing and other rich media, as it allows marketers to measure attention - but, for one, the metric does not account for RSS feeds.

Rubel concludes that events and time spent will likely replace the pageview, at least for the near term.