Brian Sweeting

AJAX is having a tremendous effect on web developers (and website visitors). There have been excellent examples of it’s use popping up all over the web, along with warnings about best practices of using AJAX. Paul Scrivens points out that while some people are worried about AJAX and it’s effect on things like page views others are embracing it and enhancing the user experience to have an effect on their bottom line.

Jason Calcanis worries that the use of AJAX negatively affects his bottom line (a.k.a. pageviews)

We’ve looked at ten different ideas for AJAZ (sic) in Blogsmith (our blog software) and we’ve decided to keep all the AJAX on the blogger (i.e. publisher) side of the business and “force” the users to deal with page reloads so we can make (or not lose) money.

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The truth for any blog with comments is that the comment page refreshes are 10-20% of a site’s traffic (maybe more on community sites like Slashdot). Given how close to the bone running a blog business is you really can’t afford to lose anything, let alone double digits. Page views are what it’s all about I’m afraid.

Scrivens argues that thinking…

Provide a better user experience and I believe you will find that your audience grows making up for any “lost” pageviews. If the competition does you one better you will be losing pageviews to them and not to a technology that should only be used to help you (Gmail anyone?).

He points to Digg.com, who recently redesigned their site and implemented some AJAX for “digging” a site. In version one if you “digged” a site you had to wait for a page refresh. However, now with their slick 2.0 redesign when you digg a site you can just keep on going without the worries of a page refresh.

Jason worries that this is taking away from the pageviews of Digg and therefore hurting their bottomline. I would say that this is completely wrong. I think Digg will now have more unique visitors (much more important than pageviews) and more loyal users (much more important to Digg for the long run) because of the great v2.0 improvements. Also because the site has become that much more easier to use, people are more likely to go breeze through more pages than ever before.

Our CTO of 9rules, Colin Devroe, asked Kevin Rose of Digg how many pageviews they receive and it was 1.2 million pageviews daily (yeah, that’s an insane number). Then he asked how many he got for the pre-AJAX 1.0 version and he said about 70% of that. Good thing they didn’t lose too many pageviews…

Enhancing user experience can only have a positive effect on your bottom line. I find myself thinking that all the time when I’m using ODEO, and wishing that Netflix had the same AJAXified UI. When I subscribe to a podcast in ODEO, the page does not reload, I don’t get taken to a page with annoying recommended podcasts…I simply click the subscribe button, I see visual feedback that I’ve subscribed to the podcast and I can go merrily on my way subscribing to other podcasts, or can even start listening to that podcast right there (also without a page reload).

On the other hand, when I search for movies in Netflix, I click the button to add it to my queue, which reloads the page, tells me the movie is now in my queue and then feebly attempts to recommend other movies I may like. Good try, but 99% of the time, I hit the back button to get back to the previous page I was looking at.