Pageviews aren’t dead, it’s CPM that’s dead, and VRM is born

A lot of talk lately about how page-views are dead.

Greg Yardley suggests a solution but it looks like he’s missing an important point.
It’s not just about widgets and “share” of the page, it’s the fact that a well-built Ajax application may now substitute a rich interface for what was tens or hundreds of page requests.

So now how do you calculate a CPM? By the number of clicks on a page? (I guess Ajax will report this data back to the server)

Are advertisers going to buy into the fact that a click that delivers new data to the page makes their ad on that page worth two impressions? Doubtful.

Do we need advertising engines that deliver ads in time based or action-based way so that one HTTP request can deliver more than one ad if the user is interacting with the page for an extended period? Maybe.

Or do we need to rethink advertising in general and admit that interruption based advertising is dead in general? I’d say so.

Which is why pay-per-click is so popular and why pay-per-action will continue to grow. No doubt.

By the way, it’s not just Ajax that’s causing this death of the page-view. It’s widgets, as Greg suggests, and RSS, and syndication of other sorts that make modern web marketing almost impossible to track effectively.

What can be tracked, as always, is the effectiveness of a campaign ROI, which methods like pay-per-action help immensely.

So what’s left to do in a pay-per-action world? Attention, Gestures and Intention are the gold that needs to be mined in order to create more effective marketing.

Using that gold will help us direct relevant offers to willing individuals. What could be better than that?

We can’t do it alone. CPM is one-way marketing, and one-way is dead in all things web.

That’s where VRM comes along. It stands for Vendor Relationship Management, and it refers to a new generation of tools on the way that allow the customers to assist in the marketing relationship.

Some will resist this loss of control at first, because what’s better for the customer doesn’t seem to equate to better for the vendor. But that’s wrong because the marketplace is not an equation, it’s a relationship.

A marriage doesn’t only get better for one of the spouses as the relationship grows stronger. It gets better for both.

Page views aren’t so dead as CPM is. Long live VRM.

The Golden Fleece

I’m hoping part two of the latest Gillmor Gang will prove more interesting.

If you remember the Jason and the Argonauts tale, you might know how Jason succeeded in conquest over the Seed men by casting a stone at one, who thought it was his neighbor, and letting them all kill each other.

That’s what Steve Gillmor seems to do by letting the fellas discuss the importance of Google algorithms and whether site owners can get a cut by having search engines bid for their site search.

If Steve would have put the “knockoff” Cheerios down for a sec I know what he would have said.

It’s not whether Google’s algorithms hold up, it’s whether they can garner more stock in the conversation with all their attention data.

The winners of the future are not the best technologies. We’ll all be able to plug into those the same way we plug into an electrical outlet.

The winners are the services which add value to the conversations happening throughout distributed web networks.

These networks and conversations are fluid and changing constantly in response to our gestures.

Those who don’t get this are either thinking too hard or just not enough.

In a similar way that facial and hand gestures are a meaningful supplement to spoken conversations, the gestures which we talk about with attention are the metadata of the conversations happening on the web.

That equates to economic power because markets are conversations.

I agree with Jason Calacanis that many in the SEO business are trying to game this system, but I disagree when he says the system works. People are trying to game the system because it does not work. It just works better than the previous systems.

I can prove it Jason. I’ll write a better piece on a new cell phone than Engadget and see which shows up higher on Google.

No. Those dynamics are only part of the game.

The richer system envelops us with answers using our data and our network’s data in a chameleon like fashion, never static like Google. That’s child’s play.

Jason(Argonaut) succeeded in getting the Golden Fleece but was fickle and left Medea for another Princess.

Likewise, in the shorter term companies may succeed by amassing link attention.

The true winners won’t be seeking the Golden Fleece at all. They will be removing the barriers and letting the crystal waters flow in, filtered and clean, Pure Conversation.

RSS 3.0 Roadmap

Update: I was just BSing below but should Instant Outlining be an open protocol to provide “in-band” communication, or am I nuts?
* * *
I think it would be interesting to do what Dave Winer says and call it “Molecule”, just to see what people have in mind to make the spec better. It may never get adopted but it would still be interesting.

Some would just want to clarify the existing spec.
Some would want to create another Atom.

I might like to see a better “communications enclosure” element like:

<comm type="AIM">buddybuilder</comm>
<comm type = "skype. . .
<comm type="


We know we need better identity. In fact, let’s just scrap the old systems and build a mail/IM system right into RSS + SSE.

Who’s with me?

I’m sure something is cooking over at microformats.

The web has a felix culpa syndrome

John Milton and others call Man’s fall from Eden into sin a “felix culpa”, or beneficial fall.
The same idea can be applied to inferior technologies like HTML which have a greater ultimate good than their superior counter-parts.
The web wouldn’t have exploded so quickly if it had been built on XML.
Some will put down OPML and RSS 2.0 as inferior to other formats like RDF and Atom.
But there seems to be a felix culpa happening here as well. The inferior formats are being adopted at a faster rate than the richer ones.
If HTML begat XML, will OPML begat RDF?
That’s what Danny Ayers suggests in one of the most interesting pieces I’ve read in a while,

Say you click on a link in the content view pane, there’s no reason why this couldn’t trigger the on-the-fly generation of a new “feed” from the triplestore. When you bring in the notion of subscribing to “Reading Lists“, i.e. dynamic feed source lists, you’ve got a great way of connecting to new sources of info, again by bridging through the formats the agg understands.

This is an incredible idea. To use reading lists as a conduit to the sematic web. I love it.

Small incremental developments which offer immediate rewards stand a better chance of adoption than big leaps forwards, not matter what the reward.

I’d like to point out the irony that there are footnotes in his blog entry that suggest he’s not done with the post. He’ll come back later and finish his thoughts. Let’s get it out there and then we'’ll expand and improve upon it. He’s living by the words he suggests we adopt as an industry.

Hear. Hear.