Widget worth a pageview?

Evan Williams (Odeo CEO and Pyra/Blogger co-founder) blogs Pageviews are Obsolete

Another reason: Widgets. The web is becoming increasingly widgetized—little bits of functionality from one site are displayed on many others. The purveyors of a widget can track how many times their javascript of flash file is loaded elsewhere—but what does that mean? If you get a widget loaded in a sidebar of a blog without anyone paying attention to it, that's not worth anything. But if you're YouTube, and someone's watching a whole video and perhaps even an ad you're getting paid for, that's something else entirely. But is it a pageview?

So what is the correct tracking mechanism for widgets? I assumed that a good widget would increase feedback to the host site - but of course if your widget is self contained, if it executes entirely within a third party site, then there will be no feedback - but if it is being executed it is a successful widget. I wonder how long it will be before we see a widget tracking system launched?

Comments

[Hooman Radfar]

I definitely agree with the idea behind this post. Page views are no longer the only metric worth following. That being said, there is a great deal of work that needs to be done to determine what the NEW important metrics in a world of atomized content and services will be. I think that you will see this type of discussion occurring more and more over time...

[Hooman Radfar]

I definitely agree with the idea behind this post. Page views are no longer the only metric worth following. That being said, there is a great deal of work that needs to be done to determine what the NEW important metrics in a world of atomized content and services will be. I think that you will see this type of discussion occurring more and more over time...

[Sam Michel]

Perhaps we should move away from page views and look to 'interactions', that way reading an article in an RSS feed, or consuming some content or service through a widget would count towards a site/service's reach.