Measuring Page Views – Getting Paid
Valleywag started it and there’s been some questioning along with some tongue-in-cheek criticism (check out Scoble’s “announcement”) and general commentary (check out some excellent comments);
Paying Bloggers Based On Traffic
How many of you are relatively new to blogging? How many of you understand how to measure page views? How many stats programs have you studied? Are there different levels of value for page views based on whether you are the blogger or the network? There are many, many questions surrounding this subject – too many to address in one sitting.
I’ve never met a stats program I didn’t dislike in some way.
Have you ever heard of pogo-sticking? How about referral spam? How often are you digging into your site logs, doing some basic analysis, generating ideas for improvement?
“Pogo-sticking is when a person jumps back and forth between different pages as they search for information. This usually occurs when a search is done, and the search engine results page (SERP) displays. The searcher then selects the result that looks like it will give the best answer and solve the problem. If the answer isn’t on that page the person hits the “back” button, goes back to the SERP and tries again.
This can really skew your numbers because each time the visitor goes back and forth to pages within a web site, the statistical software on your server counts it as a page view. Sometimes it’s good to get a lot of page views, and then again, sometimes it means that the visitor is not finding what they are looking for.” [Evelyn Grazini at Hermann Strijewski, Software Developer]
Just one example of statistics getting skewed. And skewed means you lose… unless you have more than just a working knowledge of site stats and logs. Then you’re likely to find a dozen arguments for or against your argument because the perceptions are also many.
Therefore, the first thought I have is, if I was a blogger about to have my pay scale changed to getting paid by page views and I didn’t understand it as well as I would like, I’d get educated.
