We need a new system of measurement for site popularity. The standard right now is pageviews (some people use other metrics like unique visitors to paint a fuller picture, but the elevator pitch for popularity almost always quotes monthly pageviews).

The Pageviews metric completely ignores user experience; it’s nothing more than a proxy for the number of clicks on a site (and a bad proxy at that considering the recent AJAX boom and how all AJAX application interaction counts as just one page view to load the javascript).

One of the worst examples of this pageview fallacy is MySpace. Jason Calcanis recently posted on Netscape’s new Sitemail feature. He was boasting about the fact that he didn’t artificially boost pageviews like MySpace does because he made his Sitemail app using AJAX, unlike MySpace.

While I commend Jason for making an intuitive interface; I don’t think it’s cause to celebrate that Netscape took the “higher road” over MySpace. MySpace is incredibly popular, and it has nothing to do with pageviews. In fact, MySpace is popular IN SPITE of it’s pageview bloat and clunky, multi-click interface. I don’t need Alexa to tell me that MySpace is more popular than Facebook; I can just ask the first 10 teenagers I see on the street. They all are hooked on MySpace like a rat hitting the feeder bar for a food pellet, and they’ll be happy to tell you about it all day. In fact, the first 10 teenagers would give me a much more accurate representation of popularity through a qualitative interview.

I’m not saying lets completely ignore pageviews from now on; I just wish it wasn’t the standard proxy for popularity when it’s only an incredibly small piece of the popularity picture. I’ll bet on a qualitative contextual inquiry as a proxy for popularity over pageviews any day.