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.