Time To Tear Down The Wall Between Page Views And Feed Views

With the launch of its new (and very well executed) site statitistics offering, Feedburner is perfectly positioned to push forward a desperately needed evolution in web metrics — abolish the distinction between page views and feed views. From an analytic persepctive, of course I want to know how many people read my content on the site vs. in a feed reader, but from a big picture perspective, I want to know how many people read my posts, regardless of where they read it.

How about a new metric called “content views,” which is agnostic to where or how content is viewed. Content views would integrate feed and site reading. It would do away with the silly game of giving extra “view” credit for forcing users to click through to get to more of the content. It could be adapted for audio and video, which has a time dimension.

Regardless, there’s a big, fat opportunity here just waiting to be seized.