If I could go back to when I was in journalism school and share the following information with 2001 Mandy, she’d probably change majors. I won’t say when these stunts were done or who I worked for at the time – but it’s happened. I’ll repent for my sins someday.

Feel free to add your own or others you’ve seen in the comments.

Mandy’s Most Shameless Page View Ploys

1. Built a photo gallery when a story would have better served the subject matter
2. Changed the headline and summary to reflect something far more exciting/scandalous than the story’s subject.
3. Published an online story that only has a paragraph of text and a link to a competitor’s story.
4. Given premiere position to outrageous crime stories even though news judgment did not warrant it.
5. Published link bait from the AP and other services even though it was out of our coverage area.
6. Submitted news content to Digg and Fark before waiting for others to submit it.
7. Picked the sexiest girl out of a photo gallery to feature for a gallery in a prominent news spot.
8. Prominently featured crime stories/pet stories/disaster stories on the site long past their expiration date to keep getting page views.
9. Linked together completely unrelated stories to draw views to unpopular content.
10. Published content that is indistinguishable from advertising/press releases simply because it will get traffic.

Of course, we use this measurement because it’s the only way we really know how to measure ad cpm. This method is about the closest we have to the way we measured advertising value in newspapers for generations, so we just stuck with it. Each reload or link-click is measured an an impression – even if it didn’t make an impression at all.

We as an industry need to rid ourselves of this antiquated view of internet value. Page views are a metric that means very little when you get right down to it. It doesn’t measure anyone’s engagement on a page, or even how many sets of eyeballs have scanned the headline. All it tells you is that someone clicked a link to this page or refreshed it on their screen. They might not have even scanned the page.

Call me crazy, but I say we need to move away from the almighty page view just to get back to the core of our business. We know news doesn’t make an impact by merely being spotted, it needs to be read (at least a little). If we really care about engaging our audience, we should measure actual engagement (in time on site) or at least the true number of visitors (unique users).

Why pat ourselves on the back for receiving hundreds of thousands of page views from 200 people who have loaded a webcam that auto-refreshes every 10-15 seconds? Is that engagement? Are they even really watching it at all?

More importantly, does anyone even care?

• Flickr Photo Download: Facebook vs Twitter – Interesting graphic comparing Facebook and Twitter’s audiences and usage stats.
• twitter.com – Quantcast Audience Profile – I used Twitter as an example, really, but it is fascinating to see the site’s demographics and traffic from Quantcast. You can enter any site here to see Quantcast’s data. You should be familiar with the demos of your own website (or that of your employer) so as to have a better idea of the audience you’re aiming for.
• Twitter and status updating | Pew Internet & American Life Project – The actual Pew study (instead of just blog posts about it) looking at the demographics of those who share their status online across social media tools.
• Facebook’s 276% Growth in 35-54 Year Old Users | iStrategyLabs – It’s an older blog post, but this look at Facebook’s demos even in January showed the onslaught of new users outside the college-age crowd. Fascinating stuff.
• 10 Ways Journalism Schools Are Teaching Social Media – Some are better than others, but journalism schools are mixing social media into their curricula. My own alma mater, Kent State, uses Twitter pretty extensively, but other schools are going very big in their experimentation (see Newsmixer).