Whither the page view? (2)

I learn via my friends at E-consultancy that ABC Electronic in the UK – who provide traffic auditing services for online publishers – has just ratified a change in its policy on the mandatory measures that must be included in an ABCE audit return. Starting Jan 2007, it will no longer be mandatory to report page views – the new mandatory metric will be unique users. Here’s the press release.

This is interesting, particularly in the light of my previous post about what might replace the page view. It represents a big change for ABCE; though I think they’re pretty pleased because their job just got easier (a big part of what they did was trying to work out whether people were faking their data to game their page view numbers).

Whilst I think this is the right step for ABCE to have taken, there’s undoubtedly more work to be done, because advertisers need information about ‘opportunities to see’ as well as just total audience. You might have a huge audience, but if they only see one ad each visit, you’re not going to have much luck getting a message to them (except as part of some wider cross-site effort).