It doesn’t really matter if it comes from your own logfiles (and there is software to weed through this) or some javascript code that may or may not be read by browsers. Heck.. so many bots pretend to be humans and scrape your site it doesn’t even matter anymore. It also depends where you place your javascript: top or bottom of page.. is it fully loaded or not ? So once again… it all depends.

Return visitors yes, and for journalism/blogs it’s a pretty decent metric.. for other areas it is not. And so you can continue.

So here’s the thing: if you want one or two industry metrics, they’re all going to be flawed and really one is not much more superior than the other.

(After all there is a reason advertizers do not pay much for 1000cpm’s on social networks with their inflated pageviews). And advertizers know it.. but may want it for internal political reasons.

And yes.. Time spent on site is going to look better and better with AJAX interfaces, but an intelligent advertizer, would want to know why.

If not.. and you get an extensive discussion and they are willing to listen, I think you can make pretty clear what is happening on your site and why. Once again I do not see any added value in replacing one lousy process by another (quantcast)

I am totally not impressed by their user demographics. You see something similar done by MSN in their developer platform.. and it is SO NOT correct.

I have the impression they use panels to benchmark my visitor demographics. IF this is the case.. how on earth could you recommend this as so much better compared to pageviews (with their own set of flaws ofcourse).

Income level analysis ? Geez I wish it were THAT simple.. use Qauntcast and I do not have to worry about it anymore.

I wonder why Google Analytics has not offered it as an add-on-for pay service ? They already have their javascript loaded in tens of millions of pages, AND it’s an independent analytics. I am sure many would pay for such reliable stats on user demographics, income levels etc.

Perhaps there is a reason why they didn’t ??

So while I rail against PVs as an industry metric, I do not mean to say that they retain no value as an internal metric. (Heck, internally even hits can be a useful term in determining server load.)

Given all the non-cookie-enabled browsers in the world, how would we go about doing this?

UV measures aren’t perfect but they’re as good as anything the author presents as an alternative for many Web sites. Total time spent on a site is pretty meaningless if the user isn’t engaged. PVs give a decent measure of engagement for many sites.

One big problem in determining a standard measure is that Web pages aren’t used in the same way. For a site like mine (WLKY.com) PVs are a pretty solid measure given that each of our articles, videos, indices and pics has its own URL. What’s more, it’s a TV site, so the articles, built from scripts [EDIT: By "scripts," we mean TV scripts, not code that generates the articles], are generally pretty brief, which limits time spent on the site even for very active, engaged visitors.

But UV measures might not work well for a site that offered multiple things on the same page, or videos of extended length. Then time on the page would be far more important. If every video you offer is 15 minutes long, and people average 30 seconds on your site racking up 15 PVs, your audience is probably not engaged.

Anyway, long story short, I think PVs are fine for some sites and bad for others. It’s not TV or the newspaper — media which are essentially accessed the same way wherever they’re presented — and, thus, it’s very difficult to find a standard measure.

Frankly, this isn’t such a bad thing. I think big ad firms are used to looking at very simple metrics and just plugging them into a campaign.

What’s more, the old, homogenous way of doing things may or may not be effective for the advertiser, depending on if the apples are being forcibly compared to oranges or not.